I was wondering if anyone was using Amazon Glacier for long term backup?

It seems very cheap but I was wondering of I was missing something in its use?

I'd be looking to store say 5Tb odd of system setups and other personal data?

Looking at a weekly backup.

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[COLOR=Black]Liberty GT Spec B tuned 240 HP & 372 Nm at the hubs.[/COLOR] "Instead of banning high performance cars - ban low performance drivers"

Business Data?

I'm not using it, but I assume it's hosted in the US.

Not sure how sensitive you consider your data, however bare in mind that if it is hosted in the US, all your shit is subject to the Patriot Act, which essentially means they can take a look whenever and however they want without your permission.

Sounds like it might be a non-issue for you, but a lot of large Aus based organisations only use internal cloud based on this fact alone.

How do you intend to get 5Tb into it?, just trickle it in?

No Rich, using the Tokyo based servers or so the site says. However, I do take heed of the concern of hosting anywhere that allows Obama to stick his nose in when ever he feels like it. The idea was to just trickle it in over time.

Essentially, having just been through the process of recovering an associates hard drive at a reasonable cost and also having an assumed lightning strike take out 2 x 8 port switches and a MB network port I'm looking at off site back ups of the various business and personal data (photos, vids, etc). I'm reasonably adept at essential back ups (in some cases in triplicate) but they are all essentially site specific. Most site back up is one redundant RAID servers.

I've considered backing up from site x to site y and vice versa but I'm not a network specialist and have concerns regarding being hacked if I allow incoming connections on essentially domestic modem / routers to servers.

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[COLOR=Black]Liberty GT Spec B tuned 240 HP & 372 Nm at the hubs.[/COLOR] "Instead of banning high performance cars - ban low performance drivers"

Yeah, as you probably know - a RAID isn't a backup. Yes it's redundant, but if you lose the RAID, .. well you know.

I understand your concerns about opening ports etc, when using Internet based links (which are real concerns), as opposed to private IP-VPN's where you then don't need to worry about ports at all ($$), which is ideally what you want to be doing if possible.

I have inherited a few remote sites which have the need for backups, but there is never anyone on site to manage the tapes (plus taking them off-site). I have setup Shadow Protect (With Shadow Stream), so backups are taken of my data, then streamed back to my primary site which then hit tape.

This can be timed and bandwidth throttled too.

That is an ideal solution IMHO as you:

- Have one management points for disk to tape
- Are taking the backups offsite over the wire
- Don't need any human interaction at remote sites

I do know people that are doing this using Shadow Protect across Internet based links and have been successful, but you obviously want a reasonable amount of upload bandwidth, eg: SHDSL/Midband Ethernet type connection.

Shadow Protect also have a Cloud solution too:

http://www.storagecraft.com.au/cloudservices/

I would recommend this. It's a Sydney based DC, to which they have been talking about 100Gig links and epic epic amounts of storage.

Thanks for the above Rich. I'll have a look at the service and see if it suits. However I can see the upload bandwidth being the issue. Essential business data is currently cloud based to protect against location destruction issues.

In the end the large data volumes is because I'm trying to protect my personal images, video, etc and also my own audio/film work media. Having lost a substantial amount of my early audio/video/film work, which I spent a reasonable cost converting in the mid 1990s from 1" stereo tape and 2" 24 track audio, ADAT, etc in RAID failure I don't want to go through the issue again. I can convert the audio/video sources again but finding play back machines for some formats is getting harder an harder. The tape quality is also getting more and more questionable as time takes it toll. The only format that's still almost perfect is my 16mm and 35mm film work.

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[COLOR=Black]Liberty GT Spec B tuned 240 HP & 372 Nm at the hubs.[/COLOR] "Instead of banning high performance cars - ban low performance drivers"

Yeah, upload is often the problem. Sites that are running backups or have a lot of users should always be synchronous based links.

If you have run of the mill ADSL then you basically have 1024Kbps to play with, which you don't want to saturate entirely. At least with Shadow Stream you can set it to stream at say, 56Kbps from 10PM to 7AM to avoid impact.

The good news with Shadow Protect is, the backup snapshots are delta's, so if you edit a word document for example, and only change one word, the backup only takes the word you changes instead of the whole document.

This makes a massive difference when it comes down to the amount of disk space used, which obviously has a direct impact on how much data you need to push up the WAN.

SP also uses Image Manager to consolidate Daily and Monthly backups to reduce space even more.

We are using SP in WA, SA, QLD, TAS and NZ and have been for some time now, but don't use the cloud feature.