Just to confirm, you are backing up to S3 Standard and then have a Lifecycle Policy set to move that data to Glacier after 7 days. Can you verify the following, please:
* Does your Retention Policy in CloudBerry Backup ensure that all backups are being kept for a minimum of 90 days? Glacier has a 90 day minimum retention
* Have you performed any restores off the data that was located in Glacier? If so, how many files and how many GBs?
* How many files and how much data is protected and stored in Glacier (please just estimate)

Generally speaking, if data is left in Glacier untouched, the costs are low. But if you're restoring, then you need to be prepared for some additional costs. I may be stating the obvious, but Glacier is designed for long-term archiving of data that you do not plan to restore, but is there if you need to do so in an emergency.

If you have planned restores of data, then you should not place it in Glacier.

Please elaborate on your use case and we may be able to provide some additional guidelines.

If you feel, however, that the data was not touched, then please open send us the diagnostic logs via the Tools - Diagnostic menu option and refer to this thread.

Thanks.

Hi David

Thank you.

Yes I am backing up to S3 Standard and the Lifecycle Policy is set to archive to Glacier after 7 days.

* I have the default retention policy set - I will check what these are and set to keep for 90 days if that's not already set.
* I haven't performed any restores. The backups are a secondary backup for us, which we tend to use perhaps once or twice a year. I'm not expecting to need to restore anything major.
* I've just checked and I had not realised that I would be charged for UPLOAD REQUESTS which seems to be one request per object. I am backing up millions of objects. I'm still counting, but it seems I have about 26 backup sets at the moment with an average of half a million objects each :-( I guess that is where my bill is coming from.

As above I hope not to need to use the data, and I will probably put in my terms and conditions that restores will be chargeable.

I'll add together all of my backup objects now and see if I can calculate what my final bill will be for upload requests.

I will probably also set my scheduled full back-ups to be run annually, and I think there is an option in the latest version to compare full backups rather than just sending the full backup.

I'd be grateful for any further advice.

Thanks again

There's good information here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/lifecycle-transition-general-considerations.html

In particular, see the Cost Considerations section. From page:

Glacier archive request charges— Each object that you transition to the GLACIER storage class constitutes one archive request. There is a cost for each such request. If you plan to transition a large number of objects, consider the request costs.



If this is secondary backup, you may want to consider an alternate cloud option, like Wasabi, if you don't think your use case is best with S3 --> Glacier.

Thanks David,

Looks like I've bee caught out a bit with this upload request thing. Wasabi looks really good, but no DCs in the EU at the moment. I think I'll stick with S3 for now, and look at moving perhaps in the new year.

Thanks again for your help.

Sounds good. Just an FYI that our Wasabi contact let us know last week that an EU data center in Amsterdam is planned for December 2018. I'm certain Wasabi will make a big splash on their web site at that time (https://wasabi.com/)