Amazon launches Glacier archiving service

An interesting choice for a name for this product it takes on a couple of the characteristics of a Glacier. This new Amazon service is meant to provide an inexpensive method for archive storage of your data. Priced at $0.01 per GB / month, you are also charged for both upload and retrieval requests. “Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days. Learn more.”

There doesn’t seem to be a cost for transferring data into your data store or for the first GB that you transfer out. However, look at the table below for rates for greater than 1GB out bound.

Take a look at the Amazon Glacier FAQs page here.

Pros: Cheap storage for lots of data

Cons: Slow retrieval rates

Don’t consider this service for anything but long term archival storage. I don’t think this is cost effective for home users but for off site archival storage for commercial entities this could be a great solution.