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Comment by wanderfowl | Hacker News Reader

Yep, all I could think was "Wow, that's a good deal fancier than a station wagon full of tapes".

Cloud backup companies have had similar services for a while now, but it's nice to see AWS adopting it.

I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out.

Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.

Don't forget, there's the ongoing storage cost at S3, which also adds up really quickly.

3 cents/GB is cheap. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper.

$10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).

iCloud is $10/TB/mo, albeit for different use cases.

If it cost you about $1000 to buy a diskpack (4*6TB drives) you could create backups and send them to at least a half dozen locations for less money than using S3 to store that data.

Yes, S3 is cheap(ish). But given Snowball is a snapshot backup service, it's not comparatively cheaper than it would be to distribute that same data by creating a clone and sending it to a safe place.

That's not really how business IT works (unless you're sending tape off to Iron Mountain, which has its own costs and storage fees).

S3 is the cheapest "real" business storage option besides Backblaze's new storage offering. S3 can't be compared to shipping disks someplace where they sit offline.

If you are just using it for backup, you wouldn't use S3. You'd use Glacier.

What this offers is a useful way to get TBs of data up to Amazon easily, cheaply, and quickly.

If you have moderate volume, you can beat S3 pricing with object solutions like DDN or others. It all depends on your data center capacity and power costs.

If it is cold storage, you could use AWS Glacier (https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/) which is way cheaper than S3.

There was already a service where you could mail AWS removable hard disks and have them load it into S3 for you.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/

Using the calculator for that service, I put in 50TB and 25 hard drives, and the estimated charges came out to $2435.75. The point where snowball is cheaper is fairly low. 4TB on 2 drives is 194.86. Basically more than 5TB over 2 or more drives and it's cheaper to use snowball. Plus you have to pay to have the drives returned back to you.

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