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Comment by dchftcs | Hacker News Reader

Egress costs are significant by the time you want to use your backup, around $1800 to download the 18TB, which is around 10 years of storage cost. If you assume 5 years of HDD data lifetime, you need to roughly triple that monthly cost, which is not too bad, but you can buy an enterprise 20TB drive per year for that cost. Personally I would only use AWS in a way that I would almost never have to pay for egress for the entire dataset except when my house gets burned, as a last-resort backup instead of a main one.

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That's exactly what I'm using it for :)

I have a primary and backup NAS at home, and a separate archive copy updated weekly offsite locally. Then Glacier is my "there was a nuclear bomb and my entire city is completely gone" solution.

And in that case, assuming I had survived, I would be willing to pay most anything to get my data back.

Nice, that's a great point and a good use case. I normally try to stay away from AWS (when I have to care about the cost) but I think you've found a case where it makes sense!

I've already got backblaze (behind rclone) set up for my backups so adding a glacier archive would be quite easy. Thanks!

Wouldn't Backblaze be much cheaper for that?

Last time I priced it out, Backblaze was more expensive per GB — note that I'm using Glacier Deep Archive, which is something like an order of magnitude less expensive than plain Glacier-backed buckets.

It also incurs a delay of at least 6-12 hours before the first byte of retrieval occurs, when you need to restore. So there are tradeoffs for the price.

Oh, I see. I'm shamefully ignorant about everything concerning backups, so I just googled "Amazon S3 Glacier" and compared some numbers that pop up to some other providers.

> a delay of at least 6-12 hours before the first byte of retrieval occurs

Huh. I wonder how it actually works behind the curtains. Do hey actually use HDDs to store all of that, or maybe is there some physical work involved in these 12 hours to retrieve a tape-drive from the archive…

From what I remember, Deep Archive uses tape libraries, and retrieval requires a robot fetching tapes quite often, leading to that delay.

Pro tip is to create a Google Workspace org and pay the $18/mo per 5TB of Drive storage to also get no egress fees. With rclone, the process is fairly simple especially when using a service account to authenticate (so no oauth revocations or refreshing).

Yep, if costs are a concern (which for any personal backup plan they should be) then stay away from AWS. Backblaze is IMHO the best option

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