Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

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

Providing the option of purchasing a much longer archive if desired or limiting the length of time in maintaining what's been saved is brilliant. It makes all the sense in the world. At the very least, unless the retention period is clearly mandated somehow, it causes a decision maker (especially a small business owner) to think strategically about what the storage needs truly are.

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

• Tight integration with OEM backup application
• Among the lowest price per TB cloud backup provider
• AWS S3 service integration
• Optional services for initial seeding of large backup data sets
• Optional services for physical backup retrieval to speed up recovery

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

• Deleting the data is not simpler and requires manual intervention
• Integration with third party tools needs much improvement as there are very less tools that can be integrated.
• Fewer data centres presently that restrict options to meet specific geographic redundancy or data sovereignty requirements.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Since Backblaze added S3 compatibility a few years ago, it's become the most perfect online backup solution.

I also like their transparency in describing their platform and the reports of hard drive reliability are very interesting.

The free egress is priceless, too.

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

Backblaze is definitely the cheapest and most cost effective out of the 6 other services I've used in the past. For personal use, they are by and away the best service available. For business use, I believe they are a very strong contender to be the #3 guys behind AWS and Linode.

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

• Difficult to quantify the peace of mind Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage services provides.
• Based on the reported experiences of other Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage clients, recovery has been smooth. We have not yet had the need to use that function.
• Because Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage's service has been seamless, I feel much more confident in their ability to deliver what they promise when we have the need to expand or enhance what we are purchasing from them.

Incentivized