Is anyone using either S3 or Glacier to store encrypted backups of their personal computer(s)? I've only used Time Machine to back up my machine for a long time, but I don't really trust it and would like to have another back up in the cloud. Any tools that automate back up and restore to/from S3/Glacier? What are your experiences?
I use Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com/) and it works very well. I've only tested retrieving small amounts of data from it so I can't comment much on a large bill. I only wish it worked on Linux. I've been thinking about seeing if it would work with Wine.
Also recommend Arq against any service. At a certain scale, especially after factoring bandwidth for restores, Amazon Cloud Drive at a flat $60/year becomes more attractive.
I have about 150GB in /home backed up daily using Duplicity, which encrypts & compresses everything and saves to a second internal backup drive. Data is kept for 6 months minimum. After several years, the total backup size is 190GB which syncs daily to an S3 bucket and my monthly bills are about $11USD. If I ever had to restore all that from S3 it would cost extra but would not be prohibitively expensive.
Install the AWS CLI (https://aws.amazon.com/cli/) and choose whatever method you like for making an encrypted local backup. Then sync that backup partition to S3 every day.
Here's an example command you can adapt for cron to call via a shell script:
I use Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/), which uses S3. It's true, though, that I only backup a small enough subset of my files, not anywhere close to a complete image. OTOH, it's very easy to use (CLI only), and as secure as it gets.
Using S4cmd on my Debian box I backup copies of my entire Lightroom folder structure contents. All my personal photos and videos get uploaded to a bucket on S3, then I convert the entire bucket to Glacier. Now with the new pricing of $0.004/GB and easy retrieval, it's a very nice setup.
To backup nearly a terabyte of photos costs about $4/month in storage costs. Uploading costs a bit extra due to the pricing for requests.
I was a masochist and hand-rolled incremental tar snapshots to Glacier using a cronjob. It works great for keeping price down, though I learnt the "lots of retrievals" lesson the hard way once I actually tried to retrieve my data. I now compromise by doing a full snapshot monthly and incremental daily, so I'm upper bound to 30 retrievals.
I'd highly recommend not repeating my mistake - use a real backup service for your actual data. Though rolling your own can be fun and interesting, it's probably a bad idea to bet your data on it.
I use my Synology NAS pointed at Google Nearline (through the included S3 support!). GCS also supports customer supplied encryption keys, but I store the bytes as encrypted on the NAS box itself.
As others have said, if you're just trying to back up your Mac, take a look at Arq.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and get $30/month of credit, so my first 3 TB are free).
I use duplicity to backup my VPS to S3, and Fast Glacier to archive stuff to Glacier from my Windows machine (things like photographs, important documents etc.)
Note: Glacier is not a backup service, it's an archive service. It's for long term backups, vs the relatively short term of standard backups (Full, delta, delta.. cycles). With Glacier if you delete an archive before 90 days, you'll still be charged for the full 90 days of storage.
I second this. It costs about $50 for a license but they support incremental backups up to any of a NAS, s3, s3 glacier, various tiers of google cloud storage, dropbox, and google drive. Client-side encryption is built in. It's good software.
