Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Skyvia 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

Skyvia Backup is well suited for Salesforce backup creation, retention, and partial restoration.

• 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

• Skyvia Backup is a web tool, that's why we don't need to install and maintain it. The interface is pretty intuitive and you can clearly see what's going on with your backups, compare backup versions, and restore specific records per request.

• 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

• We'd like some improvement on backup email notification - we receive emails if the backup creation has failed for some reason, but we don't receive them when it has been completed, or when we run out of disk space. It requires spending some additional time to log in and check whether the disk space is still enough. Would be great to save this time for other tasks.

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

Incentivized

I love their Customer Care Team.

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

We evaluated Spanning Backup for Salesforce, but it didn't match our business scenario, as they create daily incremental backups without a possibility for retention.

• 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 measured the ROI yet, but the fact that we don't have to pay per each user that accesses our backup account is very beneficial to us, as we are a small organization.