Amazon Glacier is online archive service by Amazon. I am long user of Amazon S3 so tried Glacier and here is my hand-on experience with service and its billing.
Amazon Glacier is offering lowest per GB price model. Below you can find screen shot of Glacier billing from my Amazon account. You can also see Glacier control panel showing total storage used.
Amazon-Glacier-bill-screenshot
Here is the my Glacier Volt with used storage in GB.
Amazon Glacier console screen shot [Click to enlarge]
Glacier is very cheap to store your backups online. What is the catch ?
Glacier is for archive purpose and not for regular online backup for purpose.
- It is not end to end solution packed for normal users. It provides API and with that anyone can build apps to interact and manage Glacier. At present not enough 3rd party tools available which are user-friendly.
- Data retrieval will take 5-6 hours of delay and costs you [There is big confusion about retrieval cost per GB. As per my understanding 5% of stored data is free to retrieve. Apart from that per GB $0.1 but some experts saying it costs more $0.12 per GB].
I used speedglacier software to upload my data to Amazon Glacier. Upload is fine and fast. Every 24 hrs Glacier performs inventory on your uploaded data [ Someone saying it do every 4 hours] and shows in your Glacier console.
Now i want to check download and its cost. Bingo! fastglacier have no download function. Reached its developers and got answer “working on this and soon going to release” . Like Amazon S3 , from your Glacier console you can’t upload/download data. So you forced use 3rd party tools. Once download function available, I will update this post with real retrieval cost of files from Amazon Glacier.I will update pros and cons of Amazon Glacier service in next post.
Update: Now speedglacier software added download function and requested GB download from Amazon Glacier storage. It said wait for 4 hours. Once download complete, i will check billing summary and update you.
[8/29/2012 5:25 AM] Initiating archive-retrieval job for ****crypt/datastoretcryptvol-March-11-2012.part08.rar in US East (Northern Virginia)…
[8/29/2012 5:25 AM] Successfully initiated archive-retrieval job for ***crypt in US East (Northern Virginia)
If requested retrieval of same file twice, will amazon costs me twice?
Here is my next post with shocking Glacier data retrieval cost
Author: Rawi G
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