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Comment by ungzd | Hacker News Reader

Anybody used Glacier for home backups? I still don't understand complicated billing of backup downloads, I fear that Amazon will charge me for many thousands of dollars.

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It's actually not too hard to calculate the storage costs and it's really cheap. I've been using Glacier for backups since the service has been launched. The calculation of the retrieval costs are a bit tricky though. But if you use Glacier for disaster recovery only, it shouldn't matter too much.

For what it's worth, you can set price limits on a vault level basis so you can never accidentally charge yourself thousands of dollars. If a retrieval request is going to push you over the cost limit you've set, they'll automatically throttle the request.

When I needed to do a retrieval several months ago, I was able to limit my expense to $7/pcm and just let my client retrieve as fast as it could.

Details are on the aws blog here:https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/data-retrieval-policies-aud...

You'd have to be storing absurd amounts of stuff for it to add up to thousands of dollars. from their docs:

Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.021 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days. Learn more

It's not storage that's expensive with glacier, it's retrieval costs. If you pull data down too quickly its conceivable that it could add up to thousands. In addition to the retrieval fee you have to pay for data out which is huge - $0.09 after the first GB in us-east-1.

Let's say you store 1TB and decide to download it all later. The retrieval fee is $9.73 (1024GBx0.95x$0.01) and data transfer is $92.07 (1023x$0.09). That's over $100 for just that one retrieval.

If you can afford to recover your data over the period of three weeks, you don't put anything, though

The pricing page for Glacier is horrifically misleading. That "learn more" link digs deep into their FAQ to the real costs. Retrieving a small amount of data in a rush can cost hundreds of dollars. Glacier is not a backup product, it's an archival product. There is an enormous difference between the terms "backup" and "archival", and anyone who thinks of using an archival solution for consumer backup needs is not understanding the differences and the related costs in the event of the need to retrieve data. Glacier is meant for corporations with deep pockets for disaster recovery, not for consumers.

I'm using it as a last resort backup for all out family photos. I have a local copy on a NAS drive as well, but if the house burns down then I know I can get my data back even if it costs a couple of hundred dollars to do so. The storage costs are pretty cheap but the retrieval costs are pricey. I hope I never have to retrieve anything from there to be honest.

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