Amazon Glacier for archiving film assets / media

C

Chris Adler

Veteran
So I'm trying out Amazon's Glacier service. You can store huge amounts of data in the cloud in a very durable multi-site archive for the low cost for a penny a Gig per month. My latest short film project is about 280G for all of the assets and I'm uploading it now. So for 2.80/mo I know my project will live out in the cloud and if I ever need to suck it back down I can for what turns out to be about $24.00 in transfer fees. To me this is a better option than throwing a hard drive in a lock box or just copying the files to another external drive.

Glacier is designed for long-term storage of data that is rarely accessed, unlike most cloud storage services. I found a nifty and free Windows client (FastGlacier) that makes it easy to upload my archive. Amazon also provides a service where you can just mail them the hard drive and for a fee of about $80 they'll dump it and send you back the drive. Saves a lot of time when you have a ton of data to archive.

Just wondering what others thought of the concept. My plan is to keep a local copy on my drive for awhile, but ultimately it will just live in the cloud until I cut it loose and delete the archive or need to suck it back down.
 
There is no free lunch.

Think about it. Amazon has to pay for the drives (probably less than me and you) energy, infrastructure, personal andwhatnot.
And since Amazon is not the Salvation Army, they want to make profit.
That profit comes not only from the difference they pay for the drives.

At the end it will cost you at least the same if not more, than buying your own 3TB drives for 100 bucks.
Plus the hassle of up and downloading, extra cost for internet traffic (if you don't have a flat rate) and there is no guaranty that your data is safer than in your own shelf.

Oh, and 280G is not a huge amount. I backup several TB each month.

But to each his own.
 
Actually there is a much stronger guarantee that my data stays safe and accessible than anything I could afford on my own. The data is always automatically stored in multiple different physical locations, at at each location balanced across multiple drives. The guarantee is something like 99.9999999% or so.
 
Postmaster said:
There is no free meal.

Think about it. Amazon has to pay for the drives (probably less than me and you) energy, infrastructure, personal andwhatnot.
And since Amazon is not the Salvation Army, they want to make profit.
That profit comes not only from the difference they pay for the drives.

At the end it will cost you at least the same if not more, than buying your own 3TB drives for 100 bucks.
Plus the hassle of up and downloading, extra cost for internet traffic (if you don't have a flat rate) and there is no guaranty that your data is safer than in your own shelf.

But to each his own.
Click to expand...

I understand that Frank, but I have to tell you, digital archiving is one of those things that really kind of scares the sh*t out of me. I have been doing low budget filmmaking for a while now, and I have projects that I worked on when I first started, shot on film, where the only low generation copy that I have left is on VHS, dubbed from 3/4" video tape. The original film and edit masters were victims of the Great Storage Space Robbery of 1997! I just hate the thought of the stuff I am working on now, and have planned for the future, could end up with a similar fate. I have been looking for archive solutions, and storing my stuff on one mechanical hard drive is just not acceptable, IMHO. Right now, I am archiving finished digital projects on two mechanical hard drives but even that scares me, as I am keeping them both in one house. I recently had a meeting with a producer/director about a rather large (Budget wise, for me) project and I intentionally brought up the issue of archiving. The initial response I got when I brought up the subject was a "Deer in the headlights" stare. Right now, my thinking on this is to keep the raw footage and associated media, on duplicate mechanical hard drives, put the best copy of the lock picture cut (Without grade, or other post editing modifications), the audio mixes and the best copy of the final edit on to the mechanical hard drives, on to duplicate Solid State drives, and on to a cloud storage solution. I know that this might sound like overkill and the cost of this would not be insignificant, but I think well worth it just for the peace of mind of knowing that the project that we are working so hard on, and investing considerable sums of money on, are protected under current technologies.
 
Jordan_S said:
Why isn't two hard drives located separately enough?
Click to expand...

It depends on your time horizon as well as the amount of data you need to archive. How long must your archived data be available? When the technology changes will you remember to move your data to something readable? Will you even be cognizant of the change? Are you going to exercise those hard drives every now and then to make sure they're functional?
 
It depends on what you are shooting.

Commercials and industrial image film is often obsolete within a year.
Documentaries last longer, but lets be honest, in 20 years, nobody can read the format anymore, and even if they could, it must be something important, that they use ancient HD material at low colorsampling.
Same goes even for movies - yes there will be always some love for classics, but the chances that one of us here shoots a movie that will be considered a classic in 50 years is pretty thin.

I just tossed away a ton of SD material that I shot over the last decades and that has absolute no use.
I had a lot of wonderful nature and landmark shots. Expensive stuff I done with helicopters and Tyler mounts - most of it was 4:3 some 16:9 but still SD - nobody wanted that since years, all my double archiving (on tapes that where more expensive than HDDs) was a total wast of time and money on the long run.

So I'm a bit more relaxed these days, when it comes to archiving.
When I do work for customers, I hand them, a HDD at the end, and from there on, it's the customers responsibility.
For my owns stuff, I put it on HDDs - double backup if it was expensive (or very good) - and every few years, I check if it is still worth, than put it on newer HDDs.

Frank
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top