Amazon Glacier Online Backup Service: a game changer?

[cybis]

Amazon has announced a new online backup service that seems to be well suited to our needs.

At $0.01 per GB / month Amazon Glacier is 10x cheaper than Amazon S3! For instance, storing 500GB of data in the cloud would cost $60 per year instead of $600.

From Amazon: "Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Use Amazon S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data. Use Amazon Glacier if low storage cost is paramount, your data is rarely retrieved, and data retrieval times of several hours are acceptable."

The problem is there is currently no GUI for Glacier but I'm sure it won't be long. (Jungle Disk currently only support S3.)

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

[John.Murray]

It looks good, at first.  Note that with this plan Amazon also charges for data transfer:

Data transfer IN is currently free

Data transfer OUT
First 1 GB / month, $0.000 per GB
Up to 10 TB / month, $0.120 per GB
....

Basically a good deal for archiving, less so if your intent is online storage....

[BernardLanguillier]

I have started to consider this also. It seems to be the first online archieving offering with a price that is reasonnable.

Now, you can still buy two 4TB disks for the price of one year of storage of 6TB in Glacier. So it may still be preferable to store such discs in a seperate location less than 2 hours away from your main working area...

Cheers,
Bernard

[cybis]

Also see discussion here: 'Amazon Glacier + Lightroom ??'

[Gregs]

Just downloaded a free program called FastGlacier, which provides a graphical front end for glacier. Working seamlessly. Very impressed.

[Steve Weldon]

I've been using S3 for most of my site for well over a year now.  At first I was worried my site performance would suffer.. but now with over 90% of my images and other image files on S3, my entire site.. performance has increased (a bunch).

And over the last 12 months Amazon has started all types of  storage solutions.   I'm sure there will be many more.

[kikashi]

It's all very well using an online backup service to provide peace of mind but the real test comes when disaster strikes and you need to restore from the backup. It's going to take an awfully long time to download 500GB of data over the Net. I see that Amazon do offer a service which allows you to send them a disk; they will restore your data to it and post it back. That's fine if you can afford the time, I suppose.

Bernard's proposal to buy a couple of disks and store them somewhere off-site but not too far away still seems to me to be a far better proposition, albeit that it requires a good deal more discipline in keeping the backups updated. Of course, if you live in Kansas City (I think it is), where you can get a 1Gb/sec connection to the Net, you might take a different view.

Jeremy

[mac_paolo]

Since my upload speeds are minuscule, I decided to start with my best shots only. More or less 3 GB.
Glacier is nice but you really have to send files and leave them there. So RAW+XMP more than DNG if you often update settings or if your Glacier app is not smart enough to upload modified bytes only.

I quickly realized that glacier wasn't the best choice, since for small amount of data S3 is more expensive (0.35$ per month so far ^_^) but way more flexible.

Glacier will be a game changer when any Lightroom SDK developer will release a publish service for Amazon Glacier/S3.
Is awkward to make an HD publish service to export the photos you want to upload and then point Arq (or any App you like) to sync that one on the cloud. We really need to set smart folders on Lightroom and don't care about them.

Paolo