Personal backup strategies with cloudberry and amazon glacier | Hacker News Reader

Personal backup strategies with cloudberry and amazon glacier

foldingair.blogspot.co.uk

Isn't Glacier overpriced, compared to other personal backup solutions?

Say, I have a mere 2TiB of historical data (various junk I made or collected over last ten years or so). Storing on them with Amazon is $20/mo, and if I want to look on that photos from 2008 I have to wait for several hours just to find that I misremembered where they were stored and pulled out wrong files. And unless it happened that I uploaded a good amount of data on that exact day, I'll have to pay for downloads.

Other offers for unlimited storage are Cyphertite at $10/mo, Crashplan at $6/mo, Carbonite at $100/yr, AltDrive at $4.5/mo and so on. While they're probably not-so-unlimited (they don't say that, but I guess one won't have much luck storing a petabyte), less respectable than Amazon, and most services lack an API and require to use not-so-trusty proprietary software that has to be sandboxed properly, Glacier doesn't look like a good deal to me unless we're talking about backing up some either quite big data (like tens of terabytes) or relatively small amounts of data (less than 500GiB).

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to any of companies mentioned above. Just happens that I'm currently fleeing from Bitcasa (they suck hard) and looking at various options to not maintain a self-hosted NAS.

Yes all good points. I have a relatively small data set < 200GiB and so my costs with glacier are less than $2 per month :-)

The difference is that I trust Amazon far more than those other companies you mentioned. If they go out if business or even change their "unlimited" policy, you're exposed until you can get your 2TB re-uploaded to another provider. It's a pain and a risk I'm unwilling to take. I know Amazon isn't going to suddenly try to dump me as a customer.

You're right.

Still, it's easy to improve reliability by introducing redundancy by using two backup services. And a total of $9-15/mo is still cheaper than $20+/mo. I presume the chances of multiple independent companies turning back on me at the same time as reasonably low. Well, it's not either completely impossible that even Amazon may have some hiccups, too.

I am using Glacier to store a backup of most of my personal data. This includes my home directory, the most relevant photos I have taken as jpeg, my gmvault and that's about it. I do not copy over any movies, music, raw photos or software, as this is my last line of defense, so it only needs to cover the essentials. I am under 1€ per month this way, and the backup gets refreshed only every other month or so.

I do have a local server that stores a windows backup image of my whole laptop, a second Harddisk in that Server to store a copy of the server, and an external hard disk with a windows backup at my parents that gets a refresh every time I am over there. All backups are truecrypt images for good measure, and I have tested recovery. Amazon stores a split truecrypt archive. Recovery cost about 20€ and took a day.

So yes, glacier is great as a personal backup, if you make it part of a larger strategy. To me, this is disaster recovery, and a small price to pay for this kind of insurance of important files and memories.

The chink in the armor of all these strategies is upstream bandwidth. I have lots of data to back up. If I had to upload it all, it would seriously soak up my upstream bandwidth. If I had symmetrical, 1Gbit Google fiber I wouldn't have to worry, but I don't.

I know Crashplan will let you mail them a hard drive for the initial seed. I think other services have this too. The solution posted isn't really much less than Crashplan from what I can see.

Backblaze AND Amazon will do this as well. You can mail a drive to both of them.

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