Amazon Glacier Clients

Mountain Glacier

If you like to do things yourself and are setting up your own cloud backup one of the most popular and inexpensive options to use is Amazon Glacier. Amazon Glacier is great for long time archival of files which makes it great for backing up large amounts of data. Amazon Glacier is great for backing up, but recovering those files takes longer than using services like Amazon S3.

 

The great thing about Amazon Glacier is, it is cheap. Pricing starts at $0.01/GB for storage. The bad part of Amazon Glacier is the pricing. Storage fees are cheap but transfer fees start at $0.120/GB and making sense or calculating your cost on the Amazon website is next to impossible. Their is the Glacier Calculator available at Blender.ca and it can give you a better sense of what it might cost. That helps a little but it is still a bit of a guess what your monthly price can actually work out to be.

If you have no problem with not knowing your exact monthly cost you actually have a fair number of client options to use with Amazon Glacier.

Free Amazon Glacier Clients

  • FastGlacier – This is the software that was featured in Lifehacker post about using Glacier as a backup service. Is a pretty nice tool for using Glacier and you can’t beat free.
  • Duplicati – This software is cross platform, Windows, Mac and Linux,and mentioned by Steve Gibson of Security Now in episode 367 (see show notes). The software was declared complete “Trust No One”, and if you follow Steve Gibson you know he does a great job of checking into the encryption used in software. The experimental version 2 of Duplicati supports Amazon Glacier.
  • WinGlacier This is free with some restrictions like the size of file upload, folder support, compression and encryption. As the name suggests it is Windows only.
  • GlacierUploader – This is a simple java command line application for Amazon Glacier. You will want to be comfortable with the command line to make use of this client and need Java installed.
  • Simple Amazon Glacier Uploader – Another Java tool, this time it provides a graphical user interface for managing your Amazon Glacier files.

Paid Amazon Glacier Clients

  • CloudBerry – Cloudberry is Windows only but is the another backup software that gets Steve Gibson’s “Trust No One” seal of approval. It is a very nice piece of software and if I was to create my own backup using Amazon Glacier it would probably be the software I would buy to do it with. The strong encryption and other backup features like local storage make it a great option for backing up whether you use Amazon Glacier or not. I have heard they have a new version coming out soon that will also feature cloud to local backup and cloud to cloud backup.
  • Arq – Arq is like Cloudberry except for the Mac. They might not like that description, but if you use a Mac and want many of the same features as Cloudberry, Arq is your best choice.
  • CrossFTP – This is more of a traditional FTP client program for Windows, Mac and Linux and offers the ability to manage your files on Amazon S3 and Glacier. Offers a 30 day free trial after that the price starts at $24.99.
  • Syncovery – I just came across this one yesterday and it looks interesting. Supports Windows, Mac and Linux and can let you backup and sync your files using many different methods, including support for Amazon S3 and Glacier. The pro version for Amazon support costs $59.90.
  • WinGlacier – Includes features that are missing in the lite/free version. Pricing starts at only $19.95 so is not to expensive.
  • Cloud Gates – This is an interesting service and not a client exactly. Cloud Gates makes it possible to manage your files on Amazon S3 and Glacier through FTP, SFTP and WebDAV. The client on your desktop then is yor favorite FTP program running through Cloud Gates. They plan on adding support for more services, so in the future you might be able to manage Dropbox, Google Drive and more through FTP. You need a Google Account to login and create gates to manage.

Another Alternative

If you want to take advantage of the low cost of Amazon Glacier but don’t want the headache of trying to figure out the monthly cost or want no surprises I recommend you take a look at Zoolz for Home or Business. Zoolz offers a nice backup option without the headache of setting up your own Amazon S3 or Glacier vaults. It might not be the same as doing it yourself but it gives you the benefit of being able to take advantage of the inexpensive Glacier storage without the headache of trying to figure out the pricing. A Zoolz Home account starts at $36.00/year and the business version with just Glacier storage starts at $25/month. This is worth a look not only as a great way to archive your data but also as a backup of your backup.

Do you use Amazon Glacier? What is your favorite client for managing your backup?


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7 responses to “Amazon Glacier Clients”

  1. Karl Avatar
    Karl

    You forgot mtglacier, which I use in production, is very reliable and efficient.

  2. Mrsoltys Avatar

    You don’t actually even need a client to backup to Amazon Glacier, you can use Amazon’s S3 web interface. The uploader is easy to use, and the only catch is setting the S3 server to immediately archive to Glacier so you don’t pay the $0.03/GB storage fee.

    I’ve included full instructions here: http://www.mikesoltys.com/2014/07/15/amazon-glacier-dropbox-and-google/

  3. Filly Avatar
    Filly

    For Fastglacier to be actually useful you need to buy it. So Freemium, not Free.

    1. Filly Avatar
      Filly

      And the same goes for Winglacier.

  4. Jim Mills Avatar
    Jim Mills

    How is Cloud Gates free? Their minimum is $25/month.

    1. Cloud Storage Buzz Team Avatar

      Well I do make mistakes occasionally.

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