Anyone use AWS Glacier for long term storage of old projects?
I’ve been tasked with researching this and see if it would be more cost effective than LTO backup. I know the general pros and cons of cloud storage but I’m curious if anyone is using this for flame/finishing/effects specifically.
And do you have tips / best practices?
@Randy showed off Wasabi on an early Logik Live. I believe that’s a front end of sorts for AWS Glacier. It’s like $6/TB per month. He also showed using a Mac compression app called Keka to compress the shit out of your archives with a compression algo called 7z.
Thanks Andy - I looked at Wasabi, Backblaze, and AWS Glacier. Glacier seems to be the cheapest if you want really really deep archive and don’t plan to restore much. The restore process and price have some price point options but it does cost you for every ‘transaction’.
Wasabi and Backblaze look good… More straightforward with less options. Wasabi has no transaction fee so if you are doing a lot of restoring that might be a better option.
Backblaze has an option where they send you a physical raid, you load it up and send it back in. Up to 96TB.
Overall… the cost of any of these is much cheaper than LTO tapes and maintaining the LTO ecosystem. You just have to trust that they won’t get wiped out by Global EMP warfare.
I figure if there is global EMP warfare there probably won’t be much of a demand for revisions to that BOGO shoe spot from 2019. 
“In these trying times… our large corporate brand is here for you”
They’re gonna want to pull footage from four years ago…
I had this conversation with Greg Paul in another thread and bottom line they each have plus’s and minus’s and I have been doing remote work for about 5 years and I tend to use dropbox a lot and they have a business plan for 700$ a year for unlimited data so far I have something like 35 tb active and I tend to like them for a few reasons mainly their upload UI is better than using any FTP and have had a few error out which is a drag to start a 5tb upload over again and dropbox doesn’t do that. I have wasabi as well and keep a few older archives on there but I imagine after a year I will trash them and just move completely over to dropbox but like I said they all have their pros and cons but really its easy and completely allows for a peace of mind knowing you don’t have to do multiple copies.
Has anybody run into issues when restoring an archive from the cloud?
I’m finding that archives are no longer recognizable y Flame, looking like a bunch of folders, rather than proper archive segments. They either have mangled the headers or something has happened. Any fixes for that?
Nothing is cheaper than a stack of LTO tapes.
Actually yes - I redact my statement from 2022. We tried Glacier and it was not worth it. We have a near-line emergency backup on Backblaze but we went back to LTO for everything.
I’ve used Glacier for some long-term storage. I think ultimately they do use LTO on the backend for that, since there are delays in getting it back. I suggest you look into the fine print of retrieval SLA. You also have to commit to some minimum storage periods if I recall correctly.
I got burned by something similar by Frame.IO. Had an Frame.IO archived project, needed it back, requested, and nada. Even 48hrs later nothing and no SLA. So I restored it from my own LTO.
Anyone using LTO in a cloud based solution isn’t going to be that much cheaper. Same base cost for storage, you pay them for overhead and have less control. Just do it yourself as long as you need enough for it cover the upfront capex.
A combo of LTO that runs in the background and some small cloud storage for work in progress is a good and affordable combo.
That doesn’t sound right. I’ve never run into that issue. What are you using to transfer the archive?
@randy you were onto the right culprit!
The archives were being uploaded in the first place by some utility so, as long as we download using the same app, the archives are fine. If we download using some other means, the header gets scrambled and the files no longer read as an archive. Case solved.
Sounds like the ol FileZilla / ASCII vs Binary transfer type perhaps?
For more hints…
As eloquently stated by…
FTP Binary And ASCII Transfer Types And The Case Of Corrupt Files | JSCAPE.
Binary mode transfers files in their exact form, suitable for images, executables, and other non-text files, preventing corruption. ASCII mode converts end-of-line characters between systems, which is ideal for text files but can corrupt binary files if misused.
FileZilla and Flame file archive transfer/FTP problems go back a long, long way. It’s the first thing you ought to think of when the “headers became corrupted” in transferring between artists.
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