For Resilience, Go Glacier
Three core rules to resilience: backup, backup, and backup. I appreciate there’s a whole lot more to resilience than backups, especially in the support of the failover of systems, but backups and snapshots must be at the core of the data resilience of companies.
I remember backing up to floppy disks, and where each disk had a capacity of 1.2MB, and where you just had to hope that there were no errors on the disks when you recovered from them. But, with the advent of the public cloud, we increasingly back up to Cloud-based systems. A great advantage with these is that an intruder may delete files, but where the cloud provider will often support the recovery of deleted files (and even for different versions). You can also put back-up at arm's length of any intruder.
Overall, the bottom line comes down to costs, and how often you do the backups. Snapshots can be expensive, but allow you to quickly revert running systems. But it is backups that often provide the lowest level of storage of key files. AWS S3 buckets are one way to back up data and cost $0.023 per GB. Thus, 1TB of data can cost $23 per month to store.
But, for less expensive storage, S3 provides the Glacier storage classes for less expensive storage. This can be schemes such as S3 Glacier instance access (millisecond retrieval), S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (retrieved between 1 minute…
