It seems that there are countless options to backup and store your personal or business data these days. Services like ibackup, mozy, and crash plan seem to be popping up everywhere. Amazon Glacier is a new take on data storage and the price point is as cheap as it gets. For $0.01, Amazon will store 1 gigabyte of your data in the cloud for a month. One penny per gigabyte per month is a pretty good deal considering you could store 1 terabyte of information there for a little over $10!
This service is primarily geared for businesses looking to do offsite backup and data archiving and is available now. You do get billed $0.12 per gb to get your data back should you actually need it, but compared against the industry standard $0.30 per gigabyte, its still much cheaper. I’m planning on giving the service a go myself for a month to see if its worth storing my personal pictures and documents there since it will only cost me a quarter.
More Details from Amazon’s Page-
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.
Companies typically over-pay for data archiving. First, they’re forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth. This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money. With Amazon Glacier, you pay only for what you use. Amazon Glacier changes the game for data archiving and backup as you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, and can scale your usage up or down as needed, while AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well. It only takes a few clicks in the AWS Management Console to set up Amazon Glacier and then you can upload any amount of data you choose.
SOURCE- AWS Blog