Cloud Backup Service

General lounge Commercial Ops
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If your looking for a Cloud backup service that’s cheaper then Dropbox then you should check this out. Now that we have much higher speeds for uploading this is much more worthwhile.

$5 (us) a month unlimited storage space. Its not like Dropbox where you have an accessible drive that you can share with others. But if you want the 2nd backup space its great. And they have options to mail you a thumbdrive or HD to restore your data if you loss everything.

Anyways the link above gives you a free month and if you signup it gives you an extra 3 months service free.

Dan

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Oh and how I found this site in the first place.

Really good stats on the long term reliability of HD’s. Good if your wondering which HD’s are a good or bad choice.

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I’m a huge fan of tarsnap.

  • It’s made by security expert (and GVA local) Colin Percival
  • It’s a no-frills minimalist solution
  • It’s inexpensive

I use it for my Sovereign server.

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Thanks Dan, I’m going to look into backblaze.

I’m currently using Amazon’s Glacier storage ( $0.004 per GB/month) and I use https://fastglacier.com/ as the tool to transfer the data to Amazon. Fastglacier is open source, uses standard zip compression and encryption. One drawback of Fastglacier is that it’s a bit heavy in terms of transactions, I usually pay about another $0.25/month in transaction fees ( Amazon Glacier charges per GET or PUT ), but you can reduce the number of transactions by reducing the number of simultaneous threads.

I don’t backup my whole computer, just specific folders that are critical (photos, accounting related stuff, etc. ). Everything else I backup locally either to external drives or another computer.

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Looking at Tarsnap rates there’s a point where it becomes cheaper then Backblaze.

I have 1.8 TB of data backed up so backblaze for me is cheaper.

One thing to note with Backblaze that the cost is per machine. So if you have multiple machines you’d want to install it on a backup server. And then backup all your other machines to it.

It has its only backup software which includes scheduling and encryption key and seems to run minimally in the background.

Also the backup by defaults to most files on your computer and you fave to go in and create exclusions. They certainly aren’t trying to be stingy with the storage space you use.

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@hectorh @Jarrett I had been struggling a little with the awkwardness of glacier not having an Amazon web UI so I quizzed the aws guys that came to our office. The Amazon way to use glacier is to upload the files into s3 and set an archive policy so they are archived to glacier the next day. This gives you the aws web UI with the glacier storage pricing.

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Glacier is a rock-bottom, no frills, data storage. Hence no UI. My last month’s bill was a whopping 24 cents.

Amazon Glacier is not intended to be the primary backup mechanism. I consider it to be the equivalent of having a bank vault in another province to store your backup media.

I’ve been using FastGlacier for 3 months now and I find it quite satisfactory. I like that the meta-data format is open and easily parsed in case that I need to recover my data without FastGlacier. I also like that it stores each file individually, making it easy to recover only the required dataset. Mac’s Freeze is also compatible with FastGlacier’s metadata format. There is a python library for Linux ( glacier-cmd ).

The only drawback I have found with FastGlacier is that the free version is limited to 2 simultaneous uploads (lower data transfer rates, slower backups).

I have found out a lot about Glacier by researching on the internet, if you are curious to know what I found out, ask me.

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@hectorh, I’d love to learn more about what you’ve found out about glacier,
I’ve been thinking about it for some time, but I haven’t quite figured out
what would be the expected cost, or how much should I worry about upload
and download costs. My usage scenario would be a photo backup, and also a
place to send digital scans of all my documents. I thought google coldline
or nearline would be cheaper or similar, but it seems that you can get
0.004/GB depending on the AWS region.

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I’ve got about 200gb on Glacier, and I used to get a bill for $1.30 every
month, but they just changed the pricing scheme, and it’s now $0.80. The
North Virginia region is the cheapest, so use that, because who cares where
it’s stored?

I’m not at my computer right now, but the interface to FastGlacier looks
familiar. Pretty sure that’s what I used. I uploaded the bulk of my stuff
in May 2016, and it cost me $2.86, probably over a few days to a week,
which the client allows you to do to avoid transfer fees.

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FWIW, US-West 2 (AKA US-West Oregon) is the same pricing, and better latency to the West coast.

Google Cloud’s Cold Line storage is ~40% more expensive per GB stored/month than Glacier, but cheaper to pull data out of, and the same UI and interface as their normal object storage.
I keep meaning to move some stuff over to it.

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Here is sample pricing to backup 500GB spread across 1000 files into US West (Oregon):

Backup:
upload data transfer: free
metadata creation ( per file ): 1000 files * $0.05/1000 files = $0.05
Total cost of backup: $0.45 ( including first month’s storage )

Storage ( charged monthly )
Storage: 500GB * $0.004/GB month = $2.00/month
Minimum storage charge 3 months: $6.00 (in case you delete your data before 3 months are up)

Recovery (assuming “Bulk” priority, anywhere between 5 and 12 hours before data is available for download after Recovery request is submitted ):
Data retrieval costs for each GB: 500GB * $0.0025/GB = $1.25
File retrieval costs (per metadata set): 1000 files * $0.025 / 1000 files = $0.025
Data download transfer costs: 500GB * $0.09/GB = $45.00
Total cost of recovery: $46.275

As you can see, data retrieval is about 8x more expensive than the upload (assuming the upload costs plus the 3 month minimum storage). Glacier is not meant for frequent data retrieval. It is a disaster recovery service.

For comparison, Backblaze’s B2 Cloud storage would cost (for the same data set):
Uploads: basically free
Monthly storage cost: 500GB * $0.005/GB = $2.50 per month
Downloads: 500GB * $0.05 / GB = $25.00 ( for the sample data set, the transactional fees are irrelevant )

It would take 43 months of storage ( ~3.6 years ) for Amazon Glacier to become cheaper than Backblaze B2.

It would be interesting to create a compare table against other cloud backup solutions.

I think the real question is which company do you trust more to:

  • keep to their data integrity promises
  • still be around when you need your data

My use case is: I have a lot of very valuable files ( family pictures, trip videos, scans of important documents such as passports, land titles, wills, tax documents ). I keep those files on my primary computer. I also keep a copy of those files on a external hard drive that I store in a safe at home. In case of hardware/software/human failure, my recovery is the external hard drive that I keep in the safe.
In case of earthquake/fire/theft that destroys not only the computer but also the external hard drive, I restore my data from Glacier and create a new home backup.

I’m willing to bet that AWS Glacier uses LTO6 tape libraries. My evidence:

  • journalists quote “insiders” that claim it uses LTO6 IBM tape drives in Spectra Logic tape libraries. This is all hearsay but it does give a good lead
  • The cost of an LTO6 tape (at volume discounts ) is approximately equal to the cost of storing 3 months of a whole tape’s capacity at US-West … Amazon is making sure it’s costs are covered with the 3 month minimum storage cost
  • LTO6 tapes have an incredibly long shelf life ( claims of 30 years+ are frequent ), but they have a very poor wear lifetime ( ~360 passes over the drive heads before the tape surface is considered worn )
  • It takes about 136 passes to fully record an LTO6 tape. Leaving about 230 passes left for reading the data back for recovery operations. Glacier’s recovery costs are so high because after so many recovery operations they have to copy the tape to fresh media and throw out the old tape.

(yup, I was bored … decided to ramble for a bit )

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Why not upload it directly to NSA servers? :slight_smile:
That’s where I think it ends up anyway…

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because the restoration process takes about 30 years ( time to declassify material collected under the nsa orders)

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That’s why you setup encryption in FastGlacier :slight_smile:

All of the Snowden leaks and everything showed the NSA hacking data using
backdoors in systems that used encryption, not the encryption itself. A
proper implementation is still secure.

Gonna take them 30 years and billions of dollars to decrypt that picture of
me surfing on vacation.

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6 month deal on blackblaze atm.

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My issue with programs like fastglacier is that if you move computers you need to migrate the metadata or wait for re-indexing. I’m really liking the web only UI of S3 on aws.

For me this is for photos only, the NSA can have them.

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It’s nice that fastglacier and the other clients provide encryption, but
the downside is that it ties you to them. I think I’ll try @TomKeddie’s
suggestion and use the S3 UI and roll my own encryption. I’m still debating
whether to generate encrypted pdfs, aggregate them in large tarballs or zip
files, or batch encrypt each file with AES256 or something like that.

Thanks for bringing this up, it’s been great timing for me, I just managed
to score a nice fujitsu scanner for cheap and I might be able to do
something about my rolling resolution to go paperless

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Fastglacier uses ZIP standard encryption

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There was a discussion, not that long ago. FIY, on sale at Costco this
week. No idea how good/bad it is.

73a7ae39b1895eae68681c2fa5439e2fdb44e6e2.jpg4160×3120 2.8 MB

4ab5129f4b00d86b58d235d9dfa5626d7ee0e35e.jpg4160×3120 1.62 MB

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