This is fantastic. I've long searched for a solution like that. This is really suitable for a remote backup that only needs to be accessed if something really bad happens (i.e. a fire breaking out, etc). I'm a lone entrepreneur, so I do have backup hard disks here, but being able to additionally save this data in the cloud is great.
I'm often creating pretty big media assets, so Dropbox doesn't necessarily offer enough space or is - for me - too expensive in the 500gb version (i.e. $50 a month).
Glacier would be $10 a month for 1 terabyte. Fantastic.
> Glacier would be $10 a month for 1 terabyte. Fantastic.
+ the $120 or so per TB to transfer it outside of AWS if you need the whole thing back as fast as possible. Still likely to be very cheap as long as you treat it as a disaster recovery backup, though. Will definitively consider it.
(an alternative for you is a service like Crashplan, which also allows you very easy access to past file revisions via a java app and can be very cheap and also allow "peer to peer" backups with your friends/family; the downside with Crashplan is that it can be slow to complete a full initial backup to their servers or to get fully backed up again if you move large chunks of data around)
The only issue I see is that verifying archive integrity (you don't want to find out the archive was bad after you lost the local backup...) would be somewhat complicated, given their retrieval policies. Also, the billing for data-transfer out plus peak retrievals sounds so convoluted, I can't begin to work out what a regular test-restore procedure would cost me. Nevertheless, it's some exciting progress in remote storage!
They could provide salted hash verification: send some salt, get a list of files with SHA1(salt | filedata) via email some hours later (so they can do the verification as a low priority job).
The salt is used to prevent amazon from just keeping the hashes around to report that all is well.
To avoid abuse, restrict the number of free verification requests per month.
Or just build the verification into the storage system, and send a SNS message if data loss has occurred (just like what happens when a Reduced Redundancy object has been lost in S3).
Agreed - I'm really happy about this. I have a home NAS solution that is a few TB and it's too expensive to store on S3. This is perfect to prevent the "house burned down" scenario on very large storage devices!
I recently heard about a startup (spacemonkey) that will be offering 1TB with redundancy and no access delay for $10/month. The way they do it is really clever as well. Cloud storage has always seemed way too expensive to me, but these lower prices have me re-evaluating that.
I'm often creating pretty big media assets, so Dropbox doesn't necessarily offer enough space or is - for me - too expensive in the 500gb version (i.e. $50 a month).
Glacier would be $10 a month for 1 terabyte. Fantastic.