AWS glacier for long term storage...

[adam9c1]

Hello.
I have approximately 3TB data (photos).

I don't need to access them often. I would keep a local (LAN) copy but I'm looking for some long term storage.
I'm looking at the AWS Glacier page but still confused on pricing.

Any thoughts on this?

I will be using crashplan for other data, but just manipulating it locally, this type of content (large amount of small files) is very slow to transfer.

 

[HDFan]

The initial Crashplan upload is slow, but after it's there updates are pretty quick.

Backblaze has fast uploads (maxes out my 40 mbps upload speed), and is about the same price.

 

[adam9c1]

No matter what format I keep these photos in locally it is making that volume slow.
What I'm thinking to do is put it into glacier and also have a offline copy on a drive locally (parked/not used)

I think if I put it through crashplan, it will expect that the local copy is constantly there.
No?

 

[hobowankenobi]

No matter what format I keep these photos in locally it is making that volume slow.
What I'm thinking to do is put it into glacier and also have a offline copy on a drive locally (parked/not used)

I think if I put it through crashplan, it will expect that the local copy is constantly there.
No?

I would say yes. Last time I looked at CrashPlan (when they still had consumer/free version), it was in fact a backup tool, not a remote storage or sync tool. You could not easily browse through files. You had to open CP, search, and restore files.

A great backup tool, but not what I would want for accessing files except as disaster recovery.

 

[zorinlynx]

Obtain two 4TB drives. Copy your data to both of them. Keep one on-site, the other off-site. However often you feel comfortable with (Monthly? Whenever you take a new batch of valuable photos?) update the on-site disk, swap the drives, then update the one you just brought home.

This lets you keep three copies of your data:

- The online version on your NAS/drive/whatever
- The on-site 4TB drive (kept up to date)
- The off-site 4TB drive (in case of a disaster/theft/etc.)

If one drive dies, you still have the other one and will discover it when you do the update and swap.

Encrypt the disks; use SATA docks and you can use bare drives which are cheap and quick to mount.

EDIT: By the way, you can do this with Time Machine. Add both drives to time machine, run a backup to both. Keep one drive docked and active with regular Time Machine backups. Eventually your Mac will remind you that the other disk hasn't been backed up to in a while. You can use this to remind you to swap the drives. It'll be completely automatic.

 

[HDFan]

Add both drives to time machine, run a backup to both. Keep one drive docked and active with regular Time Machine backups.

I would never rely on TM for both backups. I have tried to do restores from TM and the backup was corrupted. Use TM on one disk and CCC on the other.

 

[zorinlynx]

I would never rely on TM for both backups. I have tried to do restores from TM and the backup was corrupted. Use TM on one disk and CCC on the other.

What was the nature of the corruption? I've been using TM for some time, have done restores and so far no issues that I've seen. Could it be that the hard drive you were using had problems?

 

[HDFan]

It's been a while since that happened so I can't remember the exact errors that occurred. It happened multiple times on different disks. It was not hardware related, in terms of such things as a problem with a physical disk. If the disk gets ejected unexpectedly, or there is a power failure, then that complex series of links on the TM disk can get corrupted.

There have been a lot of posts about TM corruption which you can check on this site. Just don't rely on it as your only backup.