​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

Not too long ago, Amazon introduced Glacier, an online storage/archiving solution that starts at mere cents per GB per month. Depending on your storage needs, Amazon Glacier could be the most cost-efficient way to back up your data for a lifetime. Here’s what you need to know about it and how to set it up.

How Amazon Glacier Works

​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

Amazon Glacier is a low-cost, online storage service where you pay every month only for what you use (online storage space plus data transfers). It’s like Amazon’s other inexpensive storage service, S3 — only about 10 times cheaper. Why does it cost so little? Amazon’s designed Glacier to be optimised for data you don’t access often — think long-term storage of photos and videos, archived project files, etc. You’re not supposed to use it to regularly retrieve files or constantly delete them off the servers, and if you do it’ll cost you.

The most important thing to know about Amazon Glacier is that if you want to retrieve files, it takes 3 to 5 hours to complete. So this isn’t for backing up and quickly retrieving a file you accidentally deleted and need right away.

Your files and folders are stored in Amazon Glacier containers called “vaults”. Amazon calls all the stuff in your Glacier vaults “archives”. These can be a single file, or you can zip multiple files and folders into a single archive, which can be as large as 40TB. If you ever need to retrieve your data, you request it by archive. (They don’t want you downloading an entire vault at once; you’ll pay dearly if you want to.)

Finally, pricing is a bit complicated, and Amazon doesn’t provide software for uploading and downloading your data, but there are great third-party tools you can use. (See below.)

Amazon Glacier vs CrashPlan and Other Backup Services

So why bother with all these quirks when you can just use CrashPlan, Backblaze or another popular online backup service? To be honest, if you just want a set-and-forget online backup system, those online solutions would be better than Glacier.

However, if you’re already backing up your data locally to a NAS or external drive, and perhaps also using cloud storage and syncing like Dropbox or Google Drive, Amazon Glacier can be your dirt cheap offsite backup. (Remember the 3-2-1 backup rule?) That way, you have your local backup for retrieving deleted files, restoring your system after a crash or whatever else. Your Amazon Glacier backup is there just in case your computer and backup drive both get ruined, like in a fire or an earthquake.

All this depends on how much you want to store offsite though. Let’s compare with our favourite online backup, CrashPlan:

  • CrashPlan’s 10GB backup plan for one computer is $US2.99 a month. For that same amount of data on Glacier, it’s roughly $US0.12 a month for the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region
  • CrashPlan’s unlimited backup for one computer is $US5.99 a month. That’s about the same you’ll pay per month to store 500GB on Glacier.
  • Other examples: 100GB would be $US1.20 a month on Glacier; 200GB would be $US2.40 a month; 300GB would be $US3.60 a month.

CrashPlan has more attractive pricing if you pay for a year or more in advance rather than monthly, but if you have less than 600GB to backup offsite, Glacier is the more affordable option. Amazon Glacier is to online storage as prepaid plans are to mobile phone contracts.

Again, this is assuming that you don’t need to retrieve any of that data regularly (e.g. you use your local or Dropbox backups instead), because, as I mentioned earlier, there are retrieval fees.

How to Back Up to Amazon Glacier

If it sounds good to you, getting started with Glacier is pretty easy.

Step 1: Sign Up for Amazon Web Services

First, sign into your Amazon account or create a new Amazon Web Services account here. You’ll need to enter a credit card, but won’t be charged until you start using Amazon Glacier/AWS. You’ll also have to verify your identity and then choose a customer support plan (most people will want the free version).

While you’re at it, protect your account with multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the last screen of the setup, a.k.a. two-factor authentication, a second layer of security for your data. If you have Google Authenticator on your mobile device, for example:

  1. Select “virtual MFA” from the types of authentication methods on Amazon
  2. Then, in Google Authenticator, go to the options menu to Add an account > scan QR barcode
  3. With your mobile device, scan the barcode Amazon displays on the screen
  4. Then enter the authentication codes from Google Authenticator into the Amazon security page

Step 2: Create a Security Access Key for Your Amazon Glacier Account

​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

Next, head to the Security Credentials page in Amazon Web Service, expand the “Access Keys” section, and click the “Create New Access Key” button. You’ll download the key file (CVS format) to your computer, which has the numbers required for Amazon Glacier client software to access your files.

Step 3: Create a Vault in Glacier

​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

In the Amazon Glacier console/homescreen, click the Create Vault button. You can also click the region name at the top navigation bar to change to a different data centre. (Amazon requires you to choose a data centre for your Glacier storage: e.g. Sydney.) These have different pricing schemes.

Just name the vault, select if you want notifications on activity for the vault, and you’re done. You can have multiple vaults (e.g. “Photo archive” or “Software backups”) in your Glacier account — as many as 1000 vaults per region — if you want to organise them better. Also, many Glacier clients allow you to create vaults directly in the software.

Step 4: Download and Install an Amazon Glacier Client

Third-party software makes uploading, syncing, and automatically backing up your data easy. I’m using Fast Glacier (free, Windows) because it has a lot of features, like bandwidth throttling, drag-and-drop support, a sync tool and support for smart data retrieval (this saves you money if you have to retrieve files, by staggering the job requests). Other popular clients include CloudBerry Explorer and Arq for Mac. Digital Inspiration has a nice overview of several Glacier clients.

For the rest of these examples, I’m going to use Fast Glacier screenshots, but they should be similar in other programs.

Step 5: Connect Your Amazon Glacier Client to Your Account

​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

Open up the Security Access Key file you downloaded to grab the Access ID and Secret Key codes to put into your client. Once you do so, you’ll see the vaults you created and can upload files and folders to them.

​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

In FastGlacier and CloudBerry Explorer (and probably the other clients), you can simply drag-and-drop folders and files to start the upload. You can do this with mapped network drives — great for backing up a NAS. This is where you would also download or delete files (knowing the limitations mentioned above).

Step 6: Automate Your Backups

​How To Use Amazon Glacier As A Cheap Backup Solution

FastGlacier has a convenient comparison and syncing tool (under Files > Compare with local folder), where you can see which files are missing from Glacier and choose to synchronise them (with options to upload only changed files, new files, or missing ones). This needs to be manually launched, though.

To automate the backups in FastGlacier, you’ll need to do it with Windows Task Scheduler. In Task Scheduler, create a new task, and point it to the FastGlacier sync script (C:Program FilesFastGlacierglacier-sync.exe). In the arguments for the task, put in the name of your Glacier Account, source folder on your computer, region you’ve selected for your vault, Vault name and directory where you want to backup to. See FastGlacier’s command line older sync tool instructions or Get in the Sky for more examples.

As an alternative, CloudBerry Backup ($US29.99, Windows) is more of a traditional backup tool for this job or you can even do it for free via FTP backup.

That’s basically it. For a few dollars a year, you add more redundancy to your backup system, with the confidence of having your most precious data saved on redundant servers and an average 99.999999999 per cent durability for your archives.


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