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

• File management
• Pricing
• Customer Service

Incentivized

• Accessing data stored in Glacier is slow. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it is undesirable nonetheless.
• Retrieving a large amount of data can be expensive; Glacier's intended use is as an archive of rarely-accessed data.
• Some users regard Glacier with fear and uncertainty. Slow retrieval time and high retrieval cost are the greatest risks of using Glacier, and they are also the Glacier interaction that most users have the least experience with.

Incentivized

• costs just went up some
• might be nice to get confirmation that it's working occasionally
• nothing else

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

Because they continuously had times they required updating the account and there were hiccups when that happened, over time, I became skeptical of their ability to keep my files secure. They were the first cloud backup storage company I had ever used and I stayed with them for almost two decades. Then it happened that we did have to do a recovery two different times because of hardware failures. It was anything but a smooth or complete recovery, and their price kept rising as their service declined. Hundreds of files were totally lost in the process. I guessed that among their strategies, it might well have been a re-focus on their part to build up their enterprise accounts and didn't seem to care about small business. I finally had enough and left them as a client.

Incentivized

• Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
• Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.

Incentivized

• We haven't had any data loss situations yet, however I'm sure our ROI will be fairly high if we have to recover any data. Backblaze is in the insurance industry, not storage.

Incentivized