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Glacier on sale from Amazon

An interestingly cheap cloud backup option from Amazon

Amazon has a new cloud storage option – slow but really cheap. Perfect for backups.

Called Glacier, with good reason, because it can take 3-5 hours before your cloud stored data is available for download.

On the upside, the prices are much cheaper than standard cloud storage. No charge for uploads to the Glacier store and no charge for downloads of up to 5% of your average monthly storage. Storage is charged at a measly $0.01 (one US cent) per GIGabyte per month.

Obviously this isn’t for cloud storage of data you need right away (the normal use for cloud storage) but good for offsite backups.

Even if you assume the worst and pay for all downloads from Glacier the cost of a Terabyte stored for a year and all downloaded once in that time is under $150.

Storage 1,024GB * $0.01 = $10.24
Downloads / Transfer of the entire store 1024GB * $0.12 = $122.88
(will be cheaper due to 5% free allowance, based on average monthly storage which varies according to calculation at the time of downloads).


In practice it’ll cost less than that, unless you really need to download everything again.

If you’re using the higher speed Amazon EC2 service in the same region transfers between the two are free.

For personal users, the interface isn’t easy but for IT professionals it’s worth considering for long term storage.

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