14
Feb

Backup your site with Amazon

14 Feb

Posted by gabiu backup/ amazon/ data integrity

Over the past decade, I've learned the same lesson several times, that keeping your data safe is very important. I lost many bytes on different occasions and was happy when I had a backup plan. We have over 5 servers in the office and the amount of information to backup is quite large. We tried different solutions, like external storage, separate server, but why not keep your data in the cloud? There aren't too many backup solutions to cover our need of over 1 TB of data. One year ago, we opted in favor of setting up our own Cloud environment with Amazon. This alternative gives us the possibility to offer scalable solutions to customers that have high traffic, and who equallly have data that is critically important. These advantages convinced us to start using Amazon Glacier.

Amazon has 2 storage systems: S3 and Glacier. The difference between the two is their purpose and price per GB.
Amazon S3 is available for you whenever you want, it's around 0.03 USD / GB + transfer costs (if you are inside AWS you don't pay the transfer).
Amazon Glacier is a backup solution, considerably cheaper (0.01 USD / GB) but it's suitable only for data archiving. If you need to restore data you have to usually wait 4-5 hours.
Both systems have durability of 99.999999999%

The process is very simple, we are using S3 for highly available data, meaning we backup our servers to S3 first. Then the information is available for instant download from Amazon S3. After 3 days we setup Lifecycle in S3 to archive to Glacier, where we can keep it for another 100 days until deletion.

Read more about Amazon S3 Lifecycle: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/archive-s3-to-glacier/
Read about Glacier and S3.