
Show HN: Freeze – Amazon Glacier GUI Client for Mac OS X - sebcode
https://freezeapp.net/
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aaronbrethorst
I've been waiting for something like this for a good, long while. If it works
half as well as the description implies, it's worth way more than $10.

Feedback:

* Help me figure out how to get at an access key and secret for my account. That could be as simple as including a button that opens up Safari with the IAM console, or as awesome as working with IAM. Right now, this is probably your product's biggest stumbling block, as Amazon's user experience is atrocious.

* "Do you want to initiate inventory retrieval for all non-empty vaults of region US East (N. Virginia)?" — I dunno, you tell me.

* They're always "OK" buttons, not "Ok"

* Inventory and Transfers visibility shouldn't be mutually exclusive

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sebcode
Thanks, that's great feedback. I admit that the app is not as user friendly as
it should be, I'll work on that for the upcoming releases.

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vbezhenar
Why would anyone use glacier for consumer needs, when Google Drive provides
almost the same price without any additional complexities? Glacier 1TB is $7
(and that's in the cheapest data center), Google Drive's 1TB is $10.

One advantage I can see is more flexible cost, you pay for what you use. Is
there other differences?

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rufugee
Well...maybe...because your data is far less likely to be indexed and used to
push advertising to you when stored on Glacier? ;)

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gcb0
Amazon sells ads just the same. it's actually the 4th biggest network.

and they are king of tracking users. nobody does better

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rufugee
Better than Google? Really? Source?

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gcb0
google only has volume.

if you require source to know that google has the least segmented audience,
you are clearly not in advertisement.

why do you think google pushed so hard for g+? or why it keeps trying to keep
people logged while searching? even with all that, they are still way behind.

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mentat
It would be neat if this gave one real time cost visibility too.

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JasonSage
That was my first thought.

Let me queue up a set of actions and tell me what those actions will cost.
Also, track my daily/weekly/monthly cost and tell me what the new rate will be
after a given set of actions.

~~~
sebcode
Thanks for the feedback. I already thought about implementing cost estimate
calculation, and that's definitely on the roadmap for an upcoming release.

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joeblau
App costs more than my annual glacier bill :), but like others I've been
looking for something like this for a while. I'll definitely support it.

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nikolay
How does it stack up to Arq [0]?

[0] [https://www.arqbackup.com/](https://www.arqbackup.com/)

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sebcode
Arq is a full featured backup solution. Freeze on the other hand is not really
meant to be a backup solution, it's rather a file transfer client for Glacier
where you get a raw view on your vault's inventories with upload/download
features.

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nikolay
Thanks!

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ungzd
Anybody used Glacier for home backups? I still don't understand complicated
billing of backup downloads, I fear that Amazon will charge me for many
thousands of dollars.

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pdpi
You'd have to be storing absurd amounts of stuff for it to add up to thousands
of dollars. from their docs:

Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and
unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can
retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free
each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a
month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn
more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.021 per gigabyte for
items deleted prior to 90 days. Learn more

~~~
hexedpackets
It's not storage that's expensive with glacier, it's retrieval costs. If you
pull data down too quickly its conceivable that it could add up to thousands.
In addition to the retrieval fee you have to pay for data out which is huge -
$0.09 after the first GB in us-east-1.

Let's say you store 1TB and decide to download it all later. The retrieval fee
is $9.73 (1024GBx0.95x$0.01) and data transfer is $92.07 (1023x$0.09). That's
over $100 for just that one retrieval.

~~~
pdpi
If you can afford to recover your data over the period of three weeks, you
don't put anything, though

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nodesocket
This looks great. Anyway to push Time Machine backups to Glacier with the app?

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davak
Arq is the tool you need.

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Fastidious
Files you backup with Arq are only visible through Arq. This application seems
different:

> "No proprietary encoding of archive descriptions. No proprietary encryption
> or compression features that would make it complicated or even impossible to
> use other clients."

That makes it different and more usable (at least for me), even if its
behavior isn't "Time Machine" alike.

A trial or a demo would be nice.

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cjensen
Arq's backup format isn't a secret. It's fully documented [1]

[1]
[https://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/s3_data_format.txt](https://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/s3_data_format.txt)

~~~
Fastidious
That matters and helps little to a regular user. If you want to access the
data from the AWS web interface, or any other client (Transmit, etc.), you are
out of luck if you use Arq.

Not being proprietary is an advantage. Freeze is as simple as it can be.

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cjensen
Correct me if I'm wrong, but de-dup and versions can't be done with the
standard format. Which means Freeze can't do it.

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sebcode
Freeze is really meant to be a plain simple file transfer client, although it
has some "helper features" like compare mode which shows differences between a
vault's inventory and a local folder and the highlighting of duplicates.

But it is not meant to be a replacement for a full featured backup solution
like Arq. I think some people like it a bit more "low-level" and simple and
that's what Freeze is for.

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binaryanomaly
Can the backups be locally encrypted before sending them to potentially
insecure aws cloud?

~~~
sebcode
Freeze has no encryption or compression features built-in, so you are
responsible to prepare the data as you want it to be stored on Glacier before
you upload it.

I don't like built-in encryption features in file transfer or backup apps too
much, because they are often proprietary and that may make it hard to switch
to another client.

As a workflow example, I personally encrypt my archives with gnupg and store
them on external hard drives and additionally upload them to Glacier for
disaster recovery.

~~~
cwisecarver
Another possible thought for the roadmap would be some sort of pluggable
architecture for encryption. Let third-parties develop open encryption plugins
that this runs inside prior to uploading.

~~~
binaryanomaly
Indeed, something like the pgp plugin for Apple Mail would be nice.

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lucaspiller
I've been looking for something like this for a while, to the point where I
started writing it yesterday. Thanks for saving my time! :D

I've been running it for the past few hours to put backups of my photos to
Glacier. I have zips of each album which vary from a few megabytes to a few
gigabytes - in total it's around 40GB. My internet connection isn't that
reliable, so around half the uploads have failed with 'Connection
Interrupted'. It would be great if they were automatically requeued (maybe at
the end of the list?) and were able to be resumed without starting from
scratch (I assume behind the scenes uploads are multipart?).

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sebcode
You're welcome :)

Yes, Freeze uses multipart uploads with 16 MB chunks. Resuming multipart
uploads works chunk-wise, for example when you've uploaded 20 MB and then the
connection drops, the upload then continues at chunk number 2. When you see
that an upload restarts from scratch, then the connection was probably
interrupted while trying to upload the first 16 MB.

About automatic retries: Freeze automatically retries 3 times and then you
have retry manually.

For unreliable and slow internet connection I recommend setting max. parallel
uploads to 1 and disabling the upload speed limit.

I plan make the chunk size configurable for a future update. I makes sense to
use a smaller upload chunk size for unreliable internet connections.

~~~
kzim
Yesterday I uploaded 12GB to Glacier and big surprise for me was price per
upload request:

$0.055 per 1,000 requests

Command line tool[1] split my 12GB into 1mb chunks and generate around 12k
requests:

$0.055 per 1,000 requests 12,694 Requests $0.70

So bigger chunks are cheaper, but probably generate more retries.

[1] - [https://github.com/uskudnik/amazon-glacier-cmd-
interface](https://github.com/uskudnik/amazon-glacier-cmd-interface)

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planetjones
looks very neat. I did use glacier for backing up my photos and it was a lot
more friendly when the feature to upload to s3 and then set an archiving
policy so it automatically got sent to glacier was introduced. However when
Amazon started offering unlimited storage in their cloud drive for $60 a year
my usage of glacier ended. This still looks like a neat implemtation and if I
have a use for glacier in the future I'll happy try this out.

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jonlucc
This looks really good. Does anyone know of any Windows or Win+Linux options
like this?

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msohcw
There's a cross platform solution built in Java, Simple Amazon Glacier
Uploader (SAGU). [simpleglacieruploader.brianmcmichael.com] If on Linux
there's a nice CLI option too.
[[https://github.com/MoriTanosuke/glacieruploader](https://github.com/MoriTanosuke/glacieruploader)]

They're not half as sleek though.

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acmecorps
Looks sleek, but any chance for a trial period?

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brandon272
It's $10 and the functionality is obvious. Just buy it.

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thejosh
And you can always get a refund as well.

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hendry
Wish this was a Web app.

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kobayashi
How does this compare with Tarsnap?

