Amazon S3 Glacier vs. AWS Snow Family

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

Incentivized

I can say it is appropriate in many ways, like the data transfer and the migration part. The generations in the AWS snow family are also helpful in choosing the right one based on the amount of data and budget aspects. Moreover, it was well suited for use in migrating bulk amounts of data. The surveillance part is a bit drawback for us, and now its ok, and we are good with it.

Incentivized

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

Incentivized

• Data migration.
• Transfer speed.
• Performance.

Incentivized

• Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing
• Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well.
• While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark.

Incentivized

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

Incentivized

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

Incentivized

Actually, we have used both the AWS Database Migration Service and AWS snow family's snowmobile, and we have a lot of experience with both migration parts. But the one we choose the best is the AWS snow family. Among these, it really works like something to migrate all the existing data to AWS servers in a very short span. Moreover, the accuracy of the data transfer is 100%.

Incentivized

• We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
• Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
• Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.

Incentivized

• No negative impact.
• No unforeseen conditions that impact ROI.

Incentivized