AWS has released a cheaper alternative to S3 cloud storage service for upload once & download rarely use case, like backups and archives.

I have 1 TB of personal backups that I keep on a single external HDD personal photos and music collection – which you upload once and probably won’t download again. (And I believe many people also have such backup archives.) There is no such backup product in the market.

Service Price per 1 TB 10,000 uploads

AWS Glacier $10/mo $0.5

AWS S3 $128/mo $0.1

Dropbox $83/mo † –

† Dropbox has no 1 TB plan, value projected upon other plans.

AWS Glacier means massive amounts of personal data can be backed up on the cloud far more cheaper than Dropbox and its alternatives. Dropbox prices will not go down and it does not even provide me a 1 TB plan.

I’d be happy to pay $10-$20/mo. for a cloud storage service for my personal backups that I keep on external hard disk. Glacier, here, provides a way for cheap backup storage. Whatever built on Glacier will be cheaper than Dropbox.

A few points about Glacier:

  • It has a built-in AES-256 encryption.
  • You can’t download what you uploaded in first 4 hours.
  • Downloading stuff is expensive than S3. So data should be downloaded rarely.

Nobody except geeks will buy 2 HDDs and store personal backups with a RAID-1 set. So I am waiting for somebody to show up with a product for personal high volume backups on the cloud!