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Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

Everything related to Glacier is ridiculously complicated.

The pricing is tricky (the per-GB price is cheap, but the retrieval can get horribly expensive). There's the fixed 4-hour delay for all actions (including listing stored files), which makes any interaction a pain. And there aren't really any good clients or high-level libraries that abstract away this complexity.

For a disaster recovery, I would certainly go for something simpler and easier to use. When everything is one fire, the last thing I need is dealing with a tricky API to restore the company files.

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I've used it a bit, and I have to say I agree.

Look Glacier is great and the prices are really good. But it isn't something an SMB wants to be using directly. Now a large enterprise who can dedicate engineers to this, sure, but an SMB really wants to be utilising Glacier by means of a third party service in my opinion.

I think it is wise to think of Glacier as cold storage. So if you need recoveries RIGHT NOW, well, it may not be for you. If you can wait 24 hours? Sure (and, yes, I realise you can recover faster than that, but between transfer times, and actually starting the transfer it can take a while).

There are some companies that sell things to IT people that use glacier natively. Veeam makes a very good backup product to backup VMs and uses Glacier natively. No need to use APIs you just select the VM you want to restore and it brings it down from your Glacier store. You have to remember that most IT people have no idea how to use an API, and aren't on Hacker News.

The Glacier API is a miserable piece of crap. A couple months ago, something regressed on Amazon's end causing uploads to fail for no good reason. We could have worked around it client-side with some changes to Boto, but that would have been painful enough that it literally would have been less work to start from scratch on Google Nearline Storage.

For better or for worse, Amazon fixed it, so we're still using Glacier.

There are Glacier clients that allow you to manage the "Restore Speed" so you don't get hit with ridiculous price hikes.

Glacier is PERFECT if you just need to restore a photo or document, and not the entire repo.

But you have to store things in larger archives or the per-object overhead hurts your pricing. When Glacier first came out I really wanted to use it, but it had so much complexity over just treating it like an object store that I didn't use it. Then add the fact that S3 Standard kept coming down in price and Glacier just stood still (thus the name).

Not that large. 25MB objects will cost you $.002 per GB to transfer, much lower than the storage and bandwidth costs. 5-10MB objects are perfectly feasible at low cost.

I'm currently storing my entire photo collection of about 50GB and ~20,000 photos. It cost me about $3 to upload the entire library. I pay around 50 cents a month for storage. YMMV, but I'm very happy with it.

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