Amazon S3 Glacier vs. GoodSync

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

It is mainly because of its features and reliability. Even when dealing with large drives, after the analysis step, it can identify the changes that occurred between the backup or synchronization drive and the master drive and presents to the use the choices of what should be done about the changes. The user can accept the changes or tweak which the backup or synchronization will do. The SW will remember those decisions for future activities on the same drives.

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

• Quickly analyzes the drives and compares files and dates to give a complete picture
• Gives you complete control over what to do with files that are similar but my not be matching. (same name, different size or date)

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

• For what it is, I can't find any shortcomings.

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

I don't know, I have not tried anything else. This product was easy to use and it actually worked even with the trial version.

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

• positive impact is the reliability of backup
• positive impact knowing that the backup is complete with no missing files
• positive impact is can be used by all, so does not require IT to be involved

Incentivized