Does it make sense to use Amazon Glacier to store a photo archive?

Question

Amazon Web Services

There is an archive of photo source codes mainly in JPEG, let's say 500 gigabytes arranged in folders. Selected copies and an archive with previews of these photos are available locally and in other storages, i.e. there is often no need to extract.
But in which case, it may be necessary to pull out the original photos separately or separate folders.

I didn’t understand from the discussion on habrahabr.ru/post/149942/ - is storage really beneficial if, most likely, the archive files will not be in demand for quite a long time?

Is it convenient to upload files separately, or is it better to pack in batches in TAR? How to save money on downloading, if you still feel like pulling out files individually, a folder, everything?

If someone figured it out already, then a ready-made recipe in the form of an answer, or even better a post, would be great.

Answer 1

Personally, I'm sure it's worth it. Now I write utilities.
How are your folders sorted? One folder is one shooting date?
If yes, your way of storage is very close to mine. In this case, I plan to do this: one folder with photos => one archive file.
In this case, if you need to extract one photo, you will need to upload one archive file. If you have 1000 folders, that's 1000 archive files, for a total of 500GB, which means an average of 500MB each. Let in reality from 50MB from 250MB. In this case, even if you need to extract the largest, but still one archive, you can ignore the 5% per month limit. The remaining payments remain. But if you need to extract the ENTIRE archive. It will either be long or expensive.
So, Glacier is exactly backup.

Answer 2

https://habrahabr.ru/sandbox/73774/
Storage is cheap.
The key word is fast.

Answer 3

In my opinion, when I lost the data, the prices of the glacier are not at all expensive. Well, either the data is not particularly necessary and expensive.

Answer 4

Is storage really beneficial if the archived files are likely not to be used for quite some time?
Let's just say it's more profitable than the vast majority of other schemes (including Amazon S3)
Is it convenient to upload files separately, or is it better to pack in batches in TAR? How to save money on downloading, if you still feel like pulling out files individually, a folder, everything?
Better pack. Download download operations cost $0.05 per 1,000 actions. Thus, uploading 100,000 photos will cost $5, downloading at least another $5 (plus additional money if the traffic exceeds 5% of the amount of stored data). And if they are in the archive, then only 1 action is “spent”.

Answer 5

In fact, Glacier has another big "minus" - pulling out all the data from there in an emergency (the hard drive crashed, the computer was stolen, the house burned down) is quite expensive. For example, downloading a 200 GB archive lying there will cost about $ 25 (despite the fact that the cost of storing it was only $ 2 / month).