Amazon S3 Glacier vs. OneDrive

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 speak from my own experience: in cases where workstations are switched every year or so, one drive makes it very simple to keep things synced, even for very large files. This is even true for large files (such as video or CAD files) that are enormous.

• 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

• Allows for easy organization of documents
• Secures files separate from general documentation
• Allows for documents to be collaborated on in live real time with multiple editors accessing the same copy
• Provides online access across the globe to resources for teams development and project needs

• 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

• Some functions and apps are not available to all countries/regions
• The one drive app takes too much space in mobile devices
• The apps for mobile devices lack some tools, like the option to search templates
• It could allow to manually plan when to sync, specially photos, which take long times to sync

Incentivized

I like Box better. If you sign into Microsoft using a personal account, be EXTREMELY careful. All of your downloads could suddenly be available to your entire company, and that is incredibly embarrassing. Did that happen to me? Not going to say, but just always check which MS account you sign into.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Using OneDrive is very intuitive and has been improved over the years. It's just like using native file management on either your Mac or PC. It's drag and drop functionality is easy and it clearly shows when files are uploaded to the cloud or if there are errors

Incentivized

It has a good performance, the pages load normally, access to the files, management, reports, everything is working well. With regard to integration with other systems, we have not done so yet.

It's a Microsoft product so there is a wealth of information online both from Microsoft directly and from millions of users but as a corporate user we also have access to direct Microsoft support through a variety of avenues (phone, email, etc.). This makes finding answers to issues more accessible, however, it does also mean that any new feature requests will get buried.

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

Box is another file-sharing application that is very similar to OneDrive. Box falls short of OneDrive in its syncing capabilities. OneDrive is very quick with syncing so you never have to be concerned that you are not using the most up-to-date materials. Box was always a bit delayed and did not always accurately sync across systems. OneDrive benefits from being backed by Microsoft, so you expect the connection across applications that it allows. OneDrive also provides consistency for use and intuitive understanding because of that Microsoft consistency. I'd prefer OneDrive over Box.

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

• OneDrive allows us to save much time on creating and archiving backup copies of our data. Microsoft gives a guarantee on the possibility of recovery of files or folders even from 30 days ago. It provides a great comfort of work.

Incentivized