Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. Backupify

Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.

Incentivized

In the past, we have had many challenges. [In my opinion], here are the most pertinent ones: Firstly, [I have found that when] backups fail, there is no notification and it is up to the user to notice. Thus you may well be paying for a service that doesn't work [in my view]. Secondly, Backupify recently moved their platform and the legacy data we had spent 8 years backing up, is no longer searchable as it was before. The most infuriating part of this change, [that I've discovered], was the lack of communication to the user base. It took [us] 6 months with support to understand the exact nature of the change. Also, [I found] that they will not do anything about this apart from add a 'feature request'. [The way I understood] the reply from the CSM was that if we don't like this, we can simply leave. As a long-standing customer [I believe] the way we were treated was disheartening and unprofessional given that you need a backup provider to be with you for the long term. [In my opinion] the change from Backupify to Datto has not been a positive experience.

• Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
• Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
• It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
• Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.

Incentivized

• Back up Google
• Back Up Microsoft
• Easy recovery of data

• Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
• Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are

Incentivized

• Multi-factor Authentication is cumbersome to set up on a new device.

Incentivized

Due to princing, availability and scalability.

Incentivized

It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.

Incentivized

Very simple user interface and straight forward to complete back ups and restore. It was very easy to set up and then easy to maintain. It does not require any regular maintenance unless you want to delete out data. I only go in to delete old user data for licenses or to restore

AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.

Incentivized

So far it’s been a 50/50. Some issues are ignored, whilst others handled quite well.

Incentivized

Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.

Incentivized

The products are very similar. [In my opinion] one would be hard-pressed to find customer care worse than what we have experienced with Datto Backupify.

• It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
• The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
• If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.

Incentivized

• Inexpensive cost for the peace of mind.

Incentivized