Most likely not and I will explain why. Amazon Glacier is designed to be like magnetic tape backups: it takes a very long time to perform the write operation and it doesn't return true unless the write operation has finished successfully. This has some implications:
- You need to pass the SHA-256 checksum of each file being uploaded. This is a computationally very expensive checksum which requires a lot of CPU power, memory and time to perform. This will lead the backup to crash under most circumstances.
- Writing data to Glacier can take minutes to hours. Each backup step has a window of a mere 10-90 seconds (usually around just 10 seconds) to perform the file transfer and receive the success message. Any longer than that and the backup process times out.
- Furthermore, the design of Glacier makes it a very bad choice for storing at-hand backups. If you want to retrieve a backup archive from Glacier you will have to typically wait for four hours. When your site is down this is an eternity.
For these reasons Glacier is not a good choice for storing at hand backups. It is a very good choice, however, for archiving backups of historic versions of your site, i.e. backups taken 3 months ago or earlier. In its latest newsletter, Amazon says that in the following months it will allow you to create bucket policies for data retention. It shall be possible to have Amazon
automatically move old backups to Glacier. When that feature is available and in conjunction with Akeeba Backup's "Maximum backup age" quota you can have automatic archiving of historic versions of your site. The typical scenario would be keeping daily backups for the last 30 days, never delete backups taken –let's say– the first day of each month and have Amazon automatically move files older than 3 months from S3 to Glacier.
That's how I envision Glacier and Akeeba Backup working together. And it actually makes perfect sense. Akeeba Backup will be provisioning backups to S3 for easy retrieval and restoration, Amazon itself will be archiving old versions of your backups to Glacier in case you need to revive –for any reason– and old version of your site.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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