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Comment by pmw | Hacker News Reader

If you want to take advantage of tape's low cost per TB for your own data backups, without the big capex of tape hardware, I heartily recommend rustic's cold storage support for Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It ends up being $1/TB/month, as long as you plan to not restore from it. (Use it as a secondary backup, and plan to restore from your primary.) I have been using rustic+GDA for about a year now, and I contributed some enhancements to this software ecosystem to make this path smooth for others. With this solution, I am no longer tempted to buy my own tape hardware!

[1]: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/commands/init/cold_storage.html

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If I don't plan to restore from it, how do I know the archive is a valid backup?

You test the backup before sending it to Glacier

I tested the back up before sending to /dev/null ?

You test the tape before sending it to Iron Mountain, and you just have to trust that Iron Mountain isn't degaussing them. You retrieve one tape from them, as a test.

This reads like one ships the physical tape? I have no idea so honest question

It's an analogy. Storing a file in Glacier is like shipping physical tapes to Iron Mountain. You don't expect to get most of them back but you expect that you can get them back if you want to. You can test this by retrieving a random or non-random sample.

Upload some test files through the same process, then restore them.

> $1/TB/month

if you actually do the math, that's expensive

Yeah, it's nice for small amounts, but $60 per TB per 5 years is more than hard drives plus parity, even with recent price increases. If you're anywhere near the sweet spot for tapes they'll be significantly cheaper.

and doesn't pulling the data cost as well?

saying that it costs to retrieve data is a massive understatement. afaik it costs about $80 to retrieve a single 1tb file, and it takes about 2 days.

Are there any online cloud storage services that cost less than $1 per TB per month?

I have several thousand video files totaling several TB that I store as a hobby.

This is purely for backup purposes, so I almost never need to retrieve the files. That said, I'd hesitate to use a service that charges something like $100 to retrieve a 1 GB file.

My understanding is that with AWS S3, you can retrieve up to 1 TB of data almost for free by using CloudFront.

I'm currently storing my files in the us-east-1 region.

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