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Comment by knorker | Hacker News Reader

I've moved all my stuff off of glacier because of their ridiculous pricing model, and user-hostile metadata handling.

I.e. you have to maintain your own index of files, where they could have just done this for you.

The pricing model for downloads is too easy to shoot yourself in the foot. I'd rather pay a tiny bit more to not have bankruptsy traps built into the product. So that's what I do now.

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What I would really like to have with AWS is some kind of prepaid scheme, first to avoid surprise costs at early stage, second to fill up enough to keep resources running in case I get into coma or my digital identity gets disrupted by some glitch. I accept that if I won't topup on time then resources are gone.

> AWS is some kind of prepaid scheme

I heard from a friend who chose AWS to handle backups specifically because he prepaid for them, that presumably is already possible.

I think maybe you're referring to the original Glacier vault model? Nowadays you can put objects in an S3 bucket (with your own object name and metadata) and set the storage class to Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Glacier Deep Archive. Then you can use the S3 APIs to get object lists etc. Also, they got rid of the insane "peak hourly request fee" stuff when downloading. https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/amazon-glacier-pricing-change...

Glacier is a different product than S3 Glacier. Plain Glacier is indeed hard to use, but S3's Glacier storage tier makes it all pretty easy to use.

Can you share alternatives you found, if any?

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