Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Iperius Backup

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

Iperius Backup is a very simple and cheap but absolutely effective solution for small infrastructures. You can use it both on Windows clients and servers, it can integrate with ESXi, MySQL, MSSQL, etc. I think the best way to use it is with their cloud space (Iperius Cloud Storage) that allows you to take care effortlessly of your small customers' data. When it comes to more complex infrastructures, I prefer relying on something different (Nakivo Backup and Replication, Promox Backup Server).

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

• Less than 15' to set up
• It has its own cloud storage solution
• It has a monitoring console
• It's very cost effective

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

• Lack of clear documentation
• Rsync not supported
• Apparently NFS shares are supported but it's not clear how to use them
• Iperius Console should be improved (it's almost a read-only dashboard and you need too many clicks to get where you want to go)

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

The company used several free solutions (e.g. Cobian Backup et al.) but they were outdated and there was no standardization, nor a simple way to monitor all the backup jobs. Iperius had all the key features needed for the task and the project is very much alive (regular new releases).

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• One standard solution for small customers
• One console to monitor backup jobs

Incentivized