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I got so confused by this retrieval pricing scheme I decided to make a spreadsheet to calculate the bill for various usage patterns, feel free to fork it and edit the numbers/scenarios:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnYE99fIo31idFd...

In short, the scheme very heavily penalises doing a large restore from backup, but it's quite cheap if you just spread your restores gracefully across the month.. which makes a lot of sense if they're using tape drives.

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I find that an easier way to think about the the retrieval pricing is "bandwidth overage times peakiness", where "bandwidth overage" is the amount of data retrieved in the day minus [5% of data stored]/[length of month], and "peakiness" is the proportion of the day's data which was retrieved in the peak hour (somewhere between 1/24 and 1).

Right.. and it's that peakiness factor that really kills you.

PS: If you were 'anonymous user 21' looking at the spreadsheet around 20 mins ago, sorry I was screwing with things, making all the bills look like $0, it's fixed again now.

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