50 days with Amazon Glacier backup

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Ama­zon Glac­ier and Arq 3 com­bined allow for off-site com­puter backup solu­tion. In Novem­ber I posted about my first impres­sions back­ing up with Ama­zon Glac­ier client Arq 3 .  Nearly 2 months in it seems like a good time for an update of my con­tin­u­ing thoughts on this off-site data backup solu­tion.  You can read more about the ser­vice and my ini­tial setup of the soft­ware in my pre­vi­ous post off-site backup with Ama­zon Glac­ier .

Glac­ier is just like it sounds: S‑L-O‑W.  The process of upload­ing my ini­tial com­plete backup is still in process and has been for 50 days, almost con­tin­u­ously.  There are of course lots of fac­tors includ­ing my house­hold inter­net upload speed.  And it is a lot of data, 165GB to date accord­ing to Arq.  Although I could have sim­ply pointed Arq at my hard drive to back it all up, I chose to pick and choose what I thought was most crit­i­cal and incre­men­tally add to my backup.  Based on the time it has taken I strongly rec­om­mend this approach — get the impor­tant data backed up first!

Test­ing your backup is crit­i­cal.  I ini­ti­ated a file restora­tion of a backed up 6MB file, which Arq reported I could expect the file to be deliv­ered in 4 hrs.  The file arrived as promised within min­utes of the 4 hours.

Glac­ier being slow can­not be fairly con­sid­ered a crit­i­cism as it is adver­tised as exactly that: Glac­ier.  What Ama­zon is offer­ing is low cost data stor­age.  To date I have spent less than $10 in fees, the major­ity being upload trans­fer charges. For instance for the month of Decem­ber while pop­u­lat­ing my backup:

81.266 GB		$0.81 ($0.010 per GB / month)
76,613 Requests		$3.83 ($0.050 per 1,000 requests)

All-in-all I am very happy with the Arq 3 and Ama­zon Glac­ier redun­dant cat­a­strophic backup solu­tion.  I’ll con­tinue to run Time Machine as a quick access local backup.

If you missed it I encour­age you to read my first post, off-site backup with Ama­zon Glac­ier , where you will find my ini­tial impres­sions dur­ing setup and the first few days with Arq 3 .

More info on Ama­zon Glacier 

Down­load Arq 3 

More Information: 
Ama­zon Glac­ier: Back Up All Your Data for Pen­nies a Month 
22 Aug 2012 00:17:05 Z
In the press release Ama­zon also says that Glac­ier data is intended to last, as in “cen­turies”. While there’s an obvi­ous use case for enter­prise web ser­vices and any dig­i­tal archiv­ing project, Glac­ier could also be used as a cheap way to cre­ate an …

New Arq 3 Taps Ama­zon Glac­ier for Backup Nir­vana
08 Nov 2012 17:26:54 Z
It’s hard to think of a cheaper, bet­ter way to cre­ate and store an off­site backup of your files. Back when Glac­ier first launched we spec­u­lated that it would be a per­fect fit for a backup util­ity like the OS X backup app Arq.

(image via Flickr by kaet44)