Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive storage questions

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 6:56 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
>
> I'm trying to figure out just how much this would cost here.  o_O  Just
> for my pics tho.
>

It works out to 1-3 cents/GB/month, depending on storage tier.
Glacier is cheapest and very secure (or so they claim), but you will
pay more to retrieve the data if you need it.  If you aren't using
RAID then I probably wouldn't use glacier since it is very likely that
you'll be doing retrievals on occasion.  The most expensive figure
costs you 10c/GB to retrieve, and should be secure (again, their
claims).  The in-between figure is for reduced redundancy - it also
costs 10c/GB to retrieve, but is less secure.


I typically use the mid-cost reduced-redundancy option, since this is
intended solely as a backup.  If I were archiving data and not keeping
a copy locally I would not use reduced-redundancy.  As a backup, it is
already redundant - what are the odds of my house and the Amazon
datacenter having a disaster on the same day?  Otherwise, if their
datacenter burns down and the data disappears, then on the next day
duplicity will simply do another full backup and I'm protected again.

One thing you can't cheaply do with Amazon is verify your backups.
Duplicity will happily check the data files against the manifest
hashes with a simple command, but it will cost you 10c/GB for whatever
you verify, since it will need to be transferred out.  I guess another
option is to launch an EC2 instance with duplicity on it and have it
do the verify.  That would be an internal Amazon transfer which is
both free and much faster, but it will cost you a few cents per hour
for the CPU time.  I also don't know if duplicity can verify a backup
without the encryption keys - if it can't then you'll have to upload
your keys to EC2 which means Amazon could read your backups if they
wanted to.  Otherwise duplicity is encrypting locally and all Amazon
does is store a bunch of encrypted data and regurgitate it on demand.

--
Rich