iProtectMac supports Amazon Glacier storage

Chris Richards

January 13, 2013 06:52

iProtectMac now backs up to Amazon’s Glacier storage (aws.amazon.com/glacier), which is only $.01/GB per month!

With Glacier you can store 100GB for just $1/month! Or store a terabyte for just $10/month!

Retrieval Costs

Amazon has designed Glacier for “infrequent retrievals”, according to their FAQ.

In the event you need to restore a significant amount of data from Glacier, Amazon may charge you an additional retrieval fee on top of the standard data-transfer-out charges.

The formula for calculating this retrieval fee is complicated, but iProtectMac helps figure it out for you. When you select an item to restore, iProtectMac shows you the expected retrieval fee given the detected download rate.

You can adjust the download rate to change the retrieval fee.

For more details on iProtectMac and Glacier, see the iProtectMac Help page.

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  John Bluhdorn

  January 11, 2014 04:59

  Unless you are an experienced Amazon Web Services user, take note of the cautions mentioned in the FAQ and be very clear about all of the AWS fees involved.

  Glacier has a lot of additional charges that a user must consider.  It is NOT a simple case of cheaper storage.

  Upload/Storage requests (one per file stored) are 10x those of S3 ($0.05/1,000 cf $0.005/1,000), while Download/Retrieval requests are 80x those of S3 ($0.05/1,000 cf $0.004/10,000).

  If I understand it correctly, every changed file will trigger a deletion of the existing file, which will incur a $0.03/GB pro-rated charge if it has been stored for less than 90 days.  In effect, every file stored will be charged a minimum of 3 months storage.  If it happens to be a file that changes frequently, storage charges could increase quickly, since every new version will incur that minimum storage fee.

  Its important to understand that Glacier is intended for long-term storage of larger archival files (zip, tar, etc).  Glacier may be less suitable as storage for regular backup of numerous, frequently-changing, small files.

  For that, S3 storage would seem preferable, despite its higher per GB storage charges.  iProtectMac provides the option to select the cheaper Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) option of S3.

  This has been my early experience in using iProtectMac to backup to Glacier storage. YMMV.

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