Cloud Backup

[Nadav Har'El]

On Thu, May 16, 2013, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: Cloud Backup":
> Nadav, Amazon has a special service made just for this:
> http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

Well, Glacier indeed appears to be great service, but it's not very
convenient to back up a Linux machine with it. I was looking for
something "natural" and "convenient" like rsync, hoping that I wouldn't
need to write my own backup software. I have some very interesting
thoughts on how I would write a backup software that worked directly
on S3 (or Glacier) without requiring any other paid service (EC2,
EBS, database, etc.), but I am not aware of any such backup software
on Linux already existing.

If anyone wants to write one, I'll be happy to give you my ideas.
(or, has anybody know of an existing tool like that?)

Another problem with Glacier compared to S3 is its ridiculously complex
pricing model. Can anybody tell me what it would cost me to download a
50 GB backup over, say, two days? My calculation comes out to $7.5,
but their pricing "algorithm" is so complex, that it could be $750 and
I wouldn't know ;-)

> The trick with Glacier is that the data is stored _offline_. That
> means two things:
> 1) It is actually more failure-redundant than EBS, S3, or rsync.net

Why have you concluded that Glacier is more redundant or safer than,
for example, S3?

And what does being "offline" help? The data is probably stored on hard
disks, just like on S3, and it's obviously connected to the Internet
(otherwise how can you get it), so what makes it safer?

> 2) You get your data about an hour _after_ you request it.
> 
> Data transfer in is free and data transfer out has a free tier per
> month. Data storage is the absolute cheapest on the internet.

Indeed :-)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, May 16 2013, 8 Sivan 5773
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The person who knows how to laugh at
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |himself will never cease to be amused.