Introduction

AWS S3 (including S3 Glacier) can provide very cheap object storage for some backup and archiving use cases. But, be careful. There are some pitfalls:

• S3 is an object store, not a file system. You will need to make sure that the tools you use to accomplish backup/archive are S3-savvy.
• Also, since S3 is not a file system, some features you might expect are missing or can be costly to replicate.
• S3 storage can be very cheap indeed, but you need to be careful that the tools you are using don't end up costing you a lot for S3 API operations used for checking object hashes and collecting other metadata from objects.

Resources

Internal

• SFTP and Cloud Object Store Clients - OS X and Windows
• S3 Sync Analysis – Analyzes S3 API-costs of various rclone settings

External

• AWS Pricing Calculator
• rclone