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by toomuchtodo 3904 days ago
I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out.

Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.
1 comments
imajes 3904 days ago
Don't forget, there's the ongoing storage cost at S3, which also adds up really quickly.
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toomuchtodo 3904 days ago
3 cents/GB is cheap. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper.

$10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).

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ctdonath 3904 days ago
iCloud is $10/TB/mo, albeit for different use cases.
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Spooky23 3904 days ago
If you have moderate volume, you can beat S3 pricing with object solutions like DDN or others. It all depends on your data center capacity and power costs.
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imajes 3904 days ago
If it cost you about $1000 to buy a diskpack (4*6TB drives) you could create backups and send them to at least a half dozen locations for less money than using S3 to store that data.

Yes, S3 is cheap(ish). But given Snowball is a snapshot backup service, it's not comparatively cheaper than it would be to distribute that same data by creating a clone and sending it to a safe place.

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toomuchtodo 3904 days ago
That's not really how business IT works (unless you're sending tape off to Iron Mountain, which has its own costs and storage fees).

S3 is the cheapest "real" business storage option besides Backblaze's new storage offering. S3 can't be compared to shipping disks someplace where they sit offline.

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jasonlotito 3904 days ago
If you are just using it for backup, you wouldn't use S3. You'd use Glacier.

What this offers is a useful way to get TBs of data up to Amazon easily, cheaply, and quickly.

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xiaoxiaoxiao 3904 days ago
If it is cold storage, you could use AWS Glacier (https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/) which is way cheaper than S3.
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