Amazon S3 Glacier vs. GoodSync

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

It is mainly because of its features and reliability. Even when dealing with large drives, after the analysis step, it can identify the changes that occurred between the backup or synchronization drive and the master drive and presents to the use the choices of what should be done about the changes. The user can accept the changes or tweak which the backup or synchronization will do. The SW will remember those decisions for future activities on the same drives.

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

• Quickly analyzes the drives and compares files and dates to give a complete picture
• Gives you complete control over what to do with files that are similar but my not be matching. (same name, different size or date)

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

• Can't sync to Sharepoint 2016 at this time. Which is a problem since we are on 2016 already.

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

For reliability, GoodSync is beyond comparison. Some of the other tools I tried either fail through the backup/synchronization process, leaving one with unknown status of what has been backed up and what has not, wasting an inordinate amount of time because one has to repeat the whole process. Goodsync, even if it stops because of power glitches can easily pick up where it left after performing the analysis

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• This has saved many hours of work because occasionally the flash drives die, break, fail or get left behind somewhere. The time to get all the files and software back in working order would take a day or two. By keeping several of them identical with GoodSync, work goes on without missing a beat.

Incentivized