Anyone backed up using Amazon Glacier?

[roger06]

I came across this

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

the other day.

It's not cloud storage, but 'frozen' storage. ie a place where you stick a lot of stuff you don't need regular access to. Most of the charges come for retrieving the data, but for somewhere to back up, for about 1p per GB per month that takes a lot of beating. No buying a device, no disk dying, no paying for power consumption and no need to worry if your house gets burgled or burns down (apart from the fact your house has been burgled or burnt down)...

 

[professorhat]

It's a nice idea - the trouble I have with it is the retrieval fees. When you look at the prices, 1 TB would cost about £90 to restore. And that doesn't include any money you've spent on storing it there. As long as you don't need to restore large amounts of data, it's okay (so for really important documents etc.). But for your main backups, a second hard disk is still the best solution in my opinion.

 

[roger06]

Yeah good point Prof. The storage cost for 1TB would also be about £11 per month.

However, for a few gigs of precious photos for example, and wanting them safe from fire, mechanical breakdown etc it's probably a good bet...

 

[leadears]

Yeah good point Prof. The storage cost for 1TB would also be about £11 per month.

However, for a few gigs of precious photos for example, and wanting them safe from fire, mechanical breakdown etc it's probably a good bet...

I've a different view on cloud services and the like, and that's if you can afford to lose the data then it's possibly OK to use them although there are also issues of security/privacy to be considered.

We've already seen vendors of cloud services lose private and business data. All the assurances in the world mean nothing when the data is gone.

I'd suggest a tested home backup/recovery mechanism that gives local control of the backup media. For the house burning down scenario data copies can be stored at a friend or family members house in a secure manner. Redundant copies of backup media are also worthwhile to protect against failure - a cloud type service might be useful for this but I'd have more faith in my own solution.

At work we added data loss to that old saying about death and taxes ;-)

 

[roger06]

Leadears - interesting how views differ. I don't agree with you at all, I think there are far more risks with low cost home backup solutions, power surges, disk failures, fire, theft etc. I guess a mix of both is probably ideal.

Prof - when I think about it I've got 25GB of SkyDrive thru work free so I'm probably better off using that actually...

What does worry me about the Amazon model is the dynamic pricing. It might be cheap but you still don't really know what you're going to be billed. I also signed up for Cloud Web Services for work related web hosting, you can get a 'free' account but I closed it once I started getting inexplicably charged.

 

[leadears]

Leadears - interesting how views differ. I don't agree with you at all, I think there are far more risks with low cost home backup solutions, power surges, disk failures, fire, theft etc. I guess a mix of both is probably ideal.

Statistically you might be right - but in the end if anyone's going to lose my data it'll be me dammit ;-) But do bear in mind that storage vendors are subject to all of the issues you listed above and more. There's also a lot that can be done to mitigate the risks, e.g. keeping storage media offline with multiple copies on multiple devices protects against power surges and disk outages.

There's also the issue of data privacy and sensitive information, I'm amazed that some businesses think it's a good idea to outsource the storage of their data.

Back to some music now ...

 

[bigboss]

I've not yet been totally enamoured by cloud storage. I'll prefer to back up on 2-3 devices at home (including a drive which isn't connected to the network / isn't powered on at all). There were some concerns regarding data ownership recently with Google:

http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/3465/google-drive-truth-about-data-ownership

Suppose I back up 1TB of my data on a cloud service, & the service provider suddenly changes T &Cs I'm not happy with, or it hikes the rates & I want to move to a cheaper provider, or if the provider decides to cease operations, can you imagine the hassle? This is besides failure of service, hacking etc.