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Amazon has opened a new cloud backup service called Amazon Glacier, which is designed to hold onto data for decades. Costs start at about a penny per month, but there's a catch: it can take up to five hours to retrieve your data.
Amazon says it's designed for "data you don't need to get to often" like database backups, image archives, digital preservation and a replacement for old fashioned magnetic tape-based storage. Anything where "retrieval times of several hours are suitable."
Costs start at 1 US cent a month per gigabyte, and your monthly bill is based on the amount of data stored and transferred. There's no limit to the amount of data you can store, and individual archives have maximum size of 40 terabytes.
It's all very secure and durable. Your data is stored on multiple devices in multiple facilities, which Amazon says provides an "average annual durability of 99.999999999 percent." There are also systematic data checks, and Glacier can "heal itself", which we presume means reconstructing lost data from backups.
You can't edit data on Amazon Glacier. You can delete it, but if an archive is removed within three months of being uploaded, you will be charged an early deletion fee.
Amazon Glacier is open to signups around the world, here.
Image credit: Shutterstock
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
