Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogig | Hacker News Reader

This recalled a horror story about huge charges when retrieving the data. I searched the link and seems like pricing was changed since the blog entry [1].

Still good idea to check the extra charges when reading.

[1] https://medium.com/@karppinen/how-i-ended-up-paying-150-for-...

View on HN

This is mentioned in the link, about $100 to get your 1TB out.

I can see home backup use cases where you might be happy to get it out at 100Gb/month over time. For example, a home photo/video library where you can view arbitrary photos, and slowly pull out all of them.

I think Amazon Glacier should be considered the third or fourth backup. First being local, second cloud or distributed and then fourth as last resort off-site. Used when everything else has catastrophically failed.

At which point 100$ per TB isn't that bad.

Just a single drive can be more than 16TB nowadays, having just a couple of those makes $90/TB seem quite high.

That's 90$ for redundant tape storage, stashed away securely in some place far away from your home. A 16TB drive is cheap, but you need a few of them to be safe against file corruption and bit rot and you need to stash them somewhere where a house fire, robbery or natural disaster can't reach them. Also, the storage itself is quite cheap, just the retrieval is expensive. But, as other people said, if you need to get this data, that few dollars won't be your problem.

Disasters often bring financial difficulty, in which cost of repair is very much a problem. It's hard to justify for any individual when much cheaper and easier to use and understand services are available. It's great if your enterprise is looking for a compliance checkbox to tick, Glacier can save a lot of time in that case.

Yeah, it's putting low cost up front, but if you need the retrieval NOW, you're going to pay it. On any cloud provider, you should absolutely be reading their pricing carefully so you can account for the cost of these situations.

As mentioned, AWS has simplified the pricing model, so getting it all at once isn't hugely expensive anymore.

outbound traffic costs don't change at all regardless of when you need your data, it will always be atleast $90/TB

Reply on news.ycombinator.com