Comment by filleokus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by filleokus | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. So let's say I have some (3) TB of data in S3 and I need to migrate it to GCP. Before this service I would have had to spin up a machine on AWS/GCP (or piggyback on some other machine already running there) and used rclone or something to do the transfer.

The costs then would have been:

- Egress (per TB)

- Machine cost (per hour)

- Work setting it up

With this service my costs are now:

- Egress (per TB)

- Movebot (per job + per TB (+ per month))

So basically I'm trading the machine-cost and hassle for the per TB cost for Movebot.

If this is a one-off/not regular thing for me, I'll probably go with the standard Movebot plan. That would cost me 255 USD (15 + 3000 * 0.08).

I don't know what sustained speed I would get between AWS and GCP (which ofc depends on regions etc), but let's say 250 Mbit/s. Something like a m5.large is ≈ 0.1 USD per hour. 3000 GB / 250 Mbit/s * 0.1 USD per hour = 2.67 USD.

Is the convenience worth me ≈ 250 USD (or a ≈ 100x "markup")? Probably not.

Perhaps there are users that do this regularly and need to have a more automated way that doesn't involve spinning up machines manually etc. I don't know.

$250 is peanuts in the great scheme of things for even small businesses. If it saves me half a day of fiddling with rclone/rsync, the chance of getting things wrong or losing data, and the burden of remembering next month how my half-assed solution is supposed to work... then it has already paid for itself.

My issue with it is that I don’t see any support for Glacier, which IMHO would be a natural target. Sticking to everyday cloud drives only limits its usefulness in the long run - ok, I’ll do the migration now and then in a year I won’t even remember that Movebot exists. I’d like a way of backing up my cloud drives to glacier periodically.

I don't think it would take half a day of fiddling, but yeah I see your point. Especially considering transit cost for 3TB would be in the ballpark of $250 as well.

However, it would $250 the next month as well.

Backing up is an interesting proposition. Especially if you could schedule Movebot to do it for you.

Just to iterate on this, appreciate all the feedback.

There is no monthly subscription, unless you are an MSP or partner, and you only pay for each backup or migration job conducted. So if it’s a one off migration, it’s just that one off fee.

You can schedule regular backups between cloud storage as well. It also supports deltas/partial updates of modified files since the last backup where possible.

I.e. you could set up a daily backup between an S3 bucket and another provider.

Another thing to note, it also supports native SFTP, SMB and NFS in an effort to help those move off more traditional systems and infrastructure.

Once again, good discussion and really appreciating the feedback.

For S3 Glacier you can just initiate a retrieval, get the data into a non Glacier storage class then move it from there.

If you put your data directly into a Glacier Vault then that'll be harder with any tool.

(And give your data to someone else)

Ex-nay on that from me.

Spinning up an instance, configuring rclone, and running rclone for a few hours is quite fine by me.

Skip the middle plan, and have two plans:

- Standard: $5 per job + $0.02 per GB

- "Enterprise": 99$ per month + $0 per job + $0.005 per GB

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