Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
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Macrium Reflect
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Macrium Reflect is an endpoint and server backup and cloning solution from Macrium Software (aka Paramount Software UK), available in personal and professional editions.
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.
Macrium Reflect is one of the best partition backup applications available in the market. It can also clone drives in addition to making images of partitions and has a very useful feature of creating a bootable recovery drive for restoring partition(s) in case the OS is not booting. There are also different products for varying needs of the end user- Macrium Reflect Server, Workstation, etc. I have restored my system without any errors many times with Macrium.
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.
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
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.
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.
We have not been opening tickets for support from Macrium at the moment, only for licencing issues, but good attention and fast response by the support team. They respond pretty fast to our emails and fixed our issues giving us a good explanation of our case without any complications. Due to the good functionality of the software we have not opened a ticket for support in years.
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.
Veeam offers Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, a product we also install and use. It compares favorably with Macrium Reflect; however, for small firms and individual wanting an added cloud backup of their full hard drive, Macrium wins out in requiring less cloud storage space by a significant margin. ShadowProtect is a rock solid competitor with a higher price and no free version. It is highly dependable, but more complicated to install and set up. The number of technical issues and quality of technical support have ruled out Acronis products. MSP360 Backup has impressive technology, but we encountered issues with restore times and full drive image restores.
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.
