Re: Amazon Glacier ?

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 08/21/12 21:21, Justin Kelly wrote:
> I'm sure someone will ask this soon enough

I've had about 20 emails and tweets so far...

> Is there any chance that tarsnap could be used with Amazon Glacier?
> - Assuming I very rarely want to restore files
> 
> Why: At $.01 per GB per month its very cheap and if I'm only even going to
> restore if there is a real disaster it + tarsnap looks to suit my needs

Short answer: Not right now.

Longer answer: At some point in the future it *may* be possible to mark
archives as "frozen", resulting in bits ending up in Amazon Glacier and
your storage costs going down.  There's a lot of work which would have
to go into that, though -- Tarsnap's deduplication makes that sort of
thing far more complicated since translating "I won't need *this archive*
any time soon" into "tarsnap can move *these bits* into cold storage" is
not at all trivial.  Also, the back-end storage costs aren't the only
factor in determining Tarsnap's pricing -- there's significant work in
translating Tarsnap protocol requests into Amazon S3 requests (and if
Tarsnap used Glacier, there would be even more for the server code to
keep track of) -- so you wouldn't see $0.01/GB for the cold-stored bits;
most likely it would be somewhere in the $0.03 - $0.05 / GB range.

I'm going to be writing a blog post about some of these details and will
mention it here when it's ready.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid