ggirao Posted October 11, 2016 Report Share Posted October 11, 2016 I'm considering using AWS for weekly (or monthly) backups. I'm not sure yet if the best suited in this case should be Glacier or S3. The critical information to store is about 4,5TB of data plus a daily 10GB of new stuff/changes. Any ideias before I start to implement? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggirao Posted October 11, 2016 Author Report Share Posted October 11, 2016 I'm not sure what counts as a request. The number of files that I upload? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted October 13, 2016 Report Share Posted October 13, 2016 IMHO the first thing you need to think about is how to upload that 4.5TB of data to Amazon. I can't find the Web page early this morning, but IIRC leading cloud backup providers have limits ≦ 30GB per day per user—because they have to accommodate thousands of users simultaneously. At that rate it would take you 150 days—almost 5 months—to upload 4.5GB of data. What you need to do is to rent an Amazon Snowball appliance; it will cost you US$200 plus shipping (both ways). You then need to follow the procedures in steps C1 through C5 of this post, replacing the first sentence in step C3 with "Copy the new local Media Set to the Snowball appliance with the Snowball software, and ship the Snowball appliance containing a copy of the new Media Set member back to Amazon." Note that you will need 5TB of extra local disk drive capacity for steps C1 through C3, but—since you won't be shipping the drive(s) containing that local Media Set anywhere—maybe you can temporarily re-purpose part or all of a 5TB drive(s) you have sitting around your local installation (you must have a lot of money at your disposal to be even considering this, so I assume you have local disk capacity "coming out of your ears"). If you really intend to store that entire 4.5TB of data on Amazon, you can ignore anything about Grooming in steps C1 and C2. However, once you notice that the price you can get for oil from your on-the-premises oil well has dropped 🤣, you will probably want to revise your plans and do something like what jethro has stated he wants to do in the thread linked to in the previous paragraph, which is to store the most recent 1TB in the cloud. Personally I think cloud storage for large copies of Retrospect backups is a snare and a delusion, and that people who are thinking about it should think instead about storing off-site copies in a safe-deposit box at their local bank branch (or at a manager's home)—which is what I do—instead. OK, Mayoff and the Retrospect Inc. engineers, go ahead and hate me for saying that. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted October 13, 2016 Report Share Posted October 13, 2016 >cloud backup providers have limits ≦ 30GB per day per user I have never heard of Amazon S3 or Google Cloud having a limit like this. I don't think this is a true statement. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggirao Posted October 13, 2016 Author Report Share Posted October 13, 2016 Hi David, It was a hell of a reply here!: It seems you know a lot about this subject, and I thank you for your thinking. I'm also contacting our ISP for getting a quote and compare. The highlights of using my ISP is (what I understand as Snowball appliance) I can deliver a set of HDDs on hand, so it will be faster than upload (at a rate of 30GB/day it's unusable). I'll keep the post updated. TY all Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted October 13, 2016 Report Share Posted October 13, 2016 >cloud backup providers have limits ≦ 30GB per day per user I have never heard of Amazon S3 or Google Cloud having a limit like this. I don't think this is a true statement. Mayoff, I said cloud backup providers. I hate—on this forum—to provide a link to the competition, but here's a link to a section in a generally rather favorable review of CP. It says "The backup started rather fast at around 300KB/s but later plummeted to only about 30-50KB/s which is only a fraction which our connection is capable of. One reason might be our location: we’re based in Germany so files need to travel over the Atlantic all the way to California. We tried to change the network and CPU settings but couldn’t get an improved throughput, unfortunately." Please check my arithmetic: 50KB/sec * 3600secs/hour * 24hours/day * 1000bytes/KB = approximately 4.3 billion bytes/day = 4.3GB/day. So 30GB/day/user doesn't sound unreasonably slow as a practical limit for an cloud backup provider. You're correct that, since Amazon S3 and Google Cloud are not cloud backup providers, they wouldn't necessarily have practical limits like that. So let's look at an example of reported upload speeds for Amazon S3. In that example, the reported worse-case upload speed is approximately 10MB/sec. At 86,400 secs/day, that's 864,000 MB/day = 864GB/day. So uploading wouldn't be so bad for ggirao, but it would still take him/her 5 days to do the initial upload at that pessimistic speed. But then there's downloading for a restore, which might run at the same speed. And this just in: See the 2013 comment by Christian C. Berclaz in the review linked to in the second sentence of my first paragraph; he says it took 3 months for him to upload "3.4Tb" (I hope he meant 3.4TB) to Amazon Glacier. I think jethro must have done equivalent analysis, which is one reason why he decided to only store a cut-down copy of his Media Set in the cloud. And when we start talking about cutting down a Media Set to most-recent backups , which I did in the post linked to as the second link in the first paragraph of post #3 in this thread, we have to start thinking about the problem I suggested two solutions for in a Product Suggestions thread. P.S.: Moved last sentence in second paragraph to a new third paragraph, to which I added another sentence linking to the suggestions I started making 8 months ago about enhancing Copy Media Set so a user doesn't have to first copy a Media Set to a destination with equal capacity, and then Groom it down. P.P.S: Added sentence to second paragraph, saying commenter reported upload speed in 2013 on Amazon Glacier equivalent to my CP optimistic estimate in post #3. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggirao Posted February 13, 2018 Author Report Share Posted February 13, 2018 On 13/10/2016 at 10:31 AM, DavidHertzberg said: need Hello People, I need to configure AWS for cloud backup with retrospect but the options aren't available. Could be this is a trial version? (Check attachments) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted February 13, 2018 Report Share Posted February 13, 2018 On 2/13/2018 at 11:01 AM, ggirao said: Hello People, I need to configure AWS for cloud backup with retrospect but the options aren't available. Could be this is a trial version? (Check attachments) ggirao, To begin with, you didn't tell us what version of Retrospect Mac you are running, or what version of macOS your "backup server" is running under. So I'll assume you're running Retrospect Mac 13, since the last post you made on these Forums—in this thread in fact—was in October 2016. I'll further assume that you are some kind of consultant who can't ask the person who installed Retrospect, since otherwise you'd know (or remember—if you installed it yourself). And I'll further assume that your real question is why the Cloud item in the drop-down menu shown in your first attachment is greyed-out. Therefore I'd first suggest that you read page 192 of the Retrospect Mac 13 User's Guide, which discusses the Licenses preferences pane. You can reach that by clicking the second-from-the-right icon shown at the top of your second attachment in the quoted post. Next select the topmost license code listed in that pane—but write it down on a slip of paper first, and click the Register button in that Preferences pane. That will give you a Web page, into which you should enter the license code you have written down and then click Next. The Support page that will take you to will tell you whether you have a trial version. Any questions you have resulting from that should be directed to Retrospect Sales. Please excuse the somewhat-unfriendly tone of this post, but last week I dropped my crystal ball while taking it out of the dishwasher. It broke, and I'm still unhappy 😞. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggirao Posted February 14, 2018 Author Report Share Posted February 14, 2018 On 13/10/2016 at 10:31 AM, DavidHertzberg said: I have retro 14.6, and there is no documentation on the manual regarding Cloud Backups :-/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted February 14, 2018 Report Share Posted February 14, 2018 (edited) On 2/14/2018 at 12:10 PM, ggirao said: First of all, ggirao, your immediately-preceding post quoted me as saying something I didn't say—you said it. Being a suspicious person, I'm inclined to believe that you did that just to generate a notification to me so I would look at this thread. If you do that again, I won't respond to your false-quote post. The polite way to get me to respond is to send me a notification, which you can do by clicking the bell icon at the top right of a Forums page and following the prompts. However the reason there is no documentation regarding Cloud Backups in the Retrospect Mac 14 User's Guide is explained in this post in another thread. I won't repeat that explanation here, because the head of Retrospect Technical Support would undoubtedly feel that I was beating his department over the head about a set of gross Retrospect Inc. errors that he wasn't responsible for. Some cloud-vendor-specific information was later documented in 16 Knowledge Base articles here, but the more-generalized info mentioned in the third paragraph of the post I linked to in the first sentence of this paragraph got completely wiped out. Did you—ggirao—bother to phone Retrospect Sales about why the drop-down option for Cloud is greyed-out in the first attachment of your post yesterday? I did a few minutes ago, and Werner told me that the option is grayed-out until you first set up an Amazon S3 account as described in the appropriate Knowledge Base article. I won't link to it, because I think it would do you good to find it yourself. Edited February 16, 2018 by DavidHertzberg Deleted duplicate word in third prgf. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggirao Posted February 15, 2018 Author Report Share Posted February 15, 2018 Hi David, First of all sorry false-quote post. This post auto saved the quote option and then I filled information without seeing that... I will read docs, thank you Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted February 18, 2018 Report Share Posted February 18, 2018 On 2/13/2018 at 11:01 AM, ggirao said: Hello People, I need to configure AWS for cloud backup with retrospect but the options aren't available. Could be this is a trial version? (Check attachments) On 2/14/2018 at 4:32 PM, DavidHertzberg said: .... .... Did you—ggirao—bother to phone Retrospect Sales about why the drop-down option for Cloud is greyed-out in the first attachment of your post yesterday? I did a few minutes ago, and Werner told me that the option is grayed-out until you first set up an Amazon S3 account as described in the appropriate Knowledge Base article. I won't link to it, because I think it would do you good to find it yourself. ggirao, I think I owe you a bit of an apology over my reaction to your first post in this thread. I now believe that you really meant to write "Could be because [my emphasis] this is a trial version?", and you simply left out the word "because" as a result of what I presume is your unfamiliarity with English. So you knew you were working with a trial license of Retrospect Mac, and meant to say that, so I shouldn't have devoted a paragraph telling you how to find that out. However this is an introduction to my telling you that, as an experiment, I tried to create a Cloud Media Set on my own non-trial copy of the Retrospect 14.6 "backup server" earlier this morning. The Cloud option in the drop-down menu was not greyed-out, even though I had not first set up an Amazon S3 account (I have never used Cloud backup, because my upload speed is too slow). So it now looks as if there is in fact a "feature" in trial-license copies of Retrospect Mac 14.6 that stops the user from setting up a Cloud Media Set. My guess is that the Retrospect Inc. engineers didn't tell Werner, who is the head of Retrospect Sales, about this "feature" because they didn't think that any sane administrator would go to the trouble of setting up an AWS S3 account while having only a trial license for Retrospect Mac. I should have double-checked what Werner told me, because as a retired applications programmer I should know that programmers frequently have trouble imagining what application users might do. So I owe you an apology for believing that a salesperson had the full facts, without first having done a test myself. My suggestion now is that you telephone Retrospect Support at 00-31-207-219-220, explain that you are trying to test Cloud backup and ran into a problem with having only a trial license, and find out if you can buy a permanent license for Retrospect Mac 14 but still get your money back if you discover in less than 45 days that it just isn't what you need. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted February 20, 2018 Report Share Posted February 20, 2018 ggirao, What happened to me Sunday created enough doubt in my mind that earlier this afternoon I put in a quick (because I don't have ASM) phone call to the head of Retrospect Technical Support. He says that there definitely is no such "feature" for a trial version, and that if the "Cloud" option on your Add Media Set drop-down menu is greyed-out—whether or not you have first set up an Amazon S3 account—you should contact Retrospect Support. He has never heard of this problem before, but suspects you have a corrupt Preferences file in your installation of the Retrospect Mac 14.6 "backup server". If you can't find a Portuguese or English-speaking Support person to solve your problem, here is why and how to file a Support Case for this bug. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted February 25, 2018 Report Share Posted February 25, 2018 I received a message from ggirao on Thursday 22 February. It said he had also contacted Support, and the problem was the version of the Engine. He's all set now. I messaged ggirao back, saying that I don't understand how he could have gotten a version of the Engine that doesn't support creating a Cloud Media Set—since he posted on 14 February that he had Retrospect Mac 14.6. I requested that he post a fuller explanation to this thread, or at least send me a message of explanation with permission to post the information. As of now I have not heard back from him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggirao Posted February 27, 2018 Author Report Share Posted February 27, 2018 On 25/02/2018 at 1:42 AM, DavidHertzberg said: I received a message from ggirao on Thursday 22 February. It said he had also contacted Support, and the problem was the version of the Engine. He's all set now. I messaged ggirao back, saying that I don't understand how he could have gotten a version of the Engine that doesn't support creating a Cloud Media Set—since he posted on 14 February that he had Retrospect Mac 14.6. I requested that he post a fuller explanation to this thread, or at least send me a message of explanation with permission to post the information. As of now I have not heard back from him. Hi David, I have 2 versions of retrospect Installed (10 and 14) and as 10 was running previously the engine was for 10. I will give more details when I have all up and running Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted February 27, 2018 Report Share Posted February 27, 2018 (edited) 11 hours ago, ggirao said: Hi David, I have 2 versions of retrospect Installed (10 and 14) and as 10 was running previously the engine was for 10. I will give more details when I have all up and running Hi Senhor Girao (I have vague memories from before the new Forums software changed almost everyone's "handle"—is your first name Gonzalo?), Thank you for posting that; it was courageous. We await more details; they will be very helpful to other administrators, so they don't run into the same problem. David H. Edited February 27, 2018 by DavidHertzberg Grammar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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