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by aoe 4966 days ago
Umm, so retrieving at 1MB/s is around $2/GB?
2 comments

Transferring 1 MB/sec for 1 hour = 3.51 GB per hour

Assume you stored 1 TB (1024 GB) and need to retrieve all of it.

Free allowance per day = (1024 * 0.05)/30 = 1.70 GB/day

Free hourly transfer allowance = 1.70/24 = 0.07 GB/hour

Billable hourly transfer rate = 3.51 - 0.07 = 3.44 GB/hour

Retrieval fee = 3.44 * 720 * 0.01 = $24.76

Based on info here: https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_ret...

In addition to the $25 retrieval fee there will also be a $120 bandwidth fee, so we're looking $145. And it will take 12 days to complete, at this speed.

Bumping up the speed by a factor of 10 will bump up the retrieval fee by the same factor, so $250 + $120 = $370 total restore cost in a little over a day's time.

Hm. I wonder if you can bill the insurance company for this in case of fire etc.

Alternatively, it would be nice if Amazon allowed several accounts to pool together their retrieval allowance - it's not likely that all of my friends will have their house burn down at the same time.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that. You get 5% of your data back for free every month but it's prorated at a data transfer rate of (5% of your data)/num days in month = data per day. if you store 1TB you can retrieve 50GB/month = ~1.66GB/day.

If you go over that it's more expensive but they prorate it based on how much free data you get and how fast you were going while you downloaded it.

But still, even if that's the maximum you can get charged if you have a small backup, it's too much.