• Lorne Lavine
    0
    Our S3 costs have been going through the roof, and as we rarely if ever restore from the cloud, I am thinking about moving the data to Glacier. A few questions:

    1. Is there a way to set MSP360 to backup directly to Glacier instead of Standard S3? I can set up lifestyle rule in S3 but it seems the data will still remain and be billed in S3? We have over 150 clients, I would prefer if this didn't have to be done on each client's agent remotely.

    2. Would I have to move the S3 data to the Glacier vault first so that incremental backups would continue properly?

    2. Anyone have familiarity with Glacier? My bill shows that we have 4 TB of data in the US East region yet when I go to the Glacier console for the region we are using, it doesn't show that a vault even exists and prompts me to create one.

    3. Any other advice or gotchas I should know about?

    Thanks for any help.
  • David Gugick
    118
    You can target S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive directly if you have the option to show storage classes enabled in Settings - Global Agent Options.

    You can also set up the Lifecycle Rules at the storage level in the Managed Backup management console in Storage Management for the S3 storage account in question. You should only have to do this once and the data should transition. You can transfer to S3 Glacier after 1 day if you want - or leave the data in S3 - Standard for a little longer to make restores easier.

    S3 Glacier is a little different than classic Glacier. We use S3 Glacier which has some benefits over the older design.

    In any case, what you are proposing is not something I would recommend. Glacier is for Archival storage. If you're using it just to lower costs, I fear you will not be happy with performance and cost should you need a restore. I would think you are better off moving to a lower cost cloud storage provider instead since they will give you hot storage at a lower cost.

    Or, if you stay with Amazon, there are ways to lower storage costs without moving directly to Glacier. You can use something like S3 Infrequent Access or S3 One Zone Infrequent Access as the target for backups. They require data stay for a minimum of 30 days and then you can use a lifecycle transition policy to move the data to Glacier after 30 Days (or longer if desired). But only move the data to Glacier if you are certain you are not going to need to restore except in an unusual case or emergency. Restoring from Glacier can be slow and expensive. It's not hot storage and should not be thought of that way. You should do some tests to understand speed and have a look at the AWS Calculator to understand costs. https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/S3

    S3- IA is about half the cost of S3 Standard. One Zone IA is a little less than that. Using services like Backblaze B2 would cost about $5 / TB. Wasabi would cost $6 / TB.
  • Lorne Lavine
    0
    Thanks, David. We've been doing backup for 20+ years have have had to restore from the cloud a total of 3 times in those 20 years, so we really don't need fast restore. What I am trying to figure out (and I think Dmitry @ MSP360 is working on this) is what is more cost effective: lowering the retention in S3 to 14 days, or using Glacier which is cheaper but has a 90 day retention.

    We tried Wasabi, the problem was that they charge for deleted files for 90 days, I think because of the way that MSP360 works, we had deleted files that were 10X our live data, so as you can imagine, the monthly fee was 10X what we were expecting. I'll look into BackBlaze, that might be an option.
  • David Gugick
    118
    Yes, Backblaze B2 does not have a retention requirement. It bills like S3 Standard using average monthly usage. Work with Dmitry and see what you find. Good luck.
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