Introduction

This is a tool to allow you to quickly push massive archives into Glacier, an ultra low-cost storage solution. It's fast to upload and cheap to maintain (currently $10 per terabyte/month), but there's a four-hour delay in all retrieval requests and a finite window to download.

Notes

• This project is meant for large, multipart uploads whose size exceeds the part-size parameter. It won't upload anything smaller and this project doesn't include a tool for downloads. I couldn't find another reliable, maintained tool to do large uploads, so I wrote one (this). I'll write a large, multipart download-tool in the near future. Until then, use what's already out there or post an issue-request. If there's an active need that precedes mine then I'll prioritize that task.
• The Amazon library (boto) that many/most people use to access AWS services (including Glacier) is currently broken for multipart uploads. Plus, the version that seems to work fine for multipart uploads is broken for Python 3. So, this library uses boto version 2.29.1 under Python 2.7 .

Installation

Install via PIP:

$ sudo pip install glacier_tool
Downloading/unpacking glacier-tool
  Downloading glacier_tool-0.2.3.tar.gz
  Running setup.py (path:/tmp/pip_build_root/glacier-tool/setup.py) egg_info for package glacier-tool

Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): boto==2.29.1 in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages (from glacier-tool)
Installing collected packages: glacier-tool
  Running setup.py install for glacier-tool

    changing mode of build/scripts-2.7/gt_upload_large from 644 to 755
    changing mode of /usr/local/bin/gt_upload_large to 755
Successfully installed glacier-tool
Cleaning up...

Usage

The command is fully-documented at the command-line. Just provide the "-h" parameter to print the usage:

$ gt_upload_large -h
usage: gt_upload_large [-h] [-em ESTIMATED_MBPS] [-pt PART_SIZE]
                       vault_name filepath description

Push a large archive into long-term storage.

positional arguments:
  vault_name            Vault name
  filepath              File-path to upload
  description           Description of uploaded file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -em ESTIMATED_MBPS, --estimated-mbps ESTIMATED_MBPS
                        Mbps to estimate a duration against
  -pt PART_SIZE, --part-size PART_SIZE
                        Part-size in bytes. Defaults to 4M. Must be between 1M
                        and 4G.

To perform the upload, you'll have to define the AWS access- and secret-key in the environment:

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=XXX
$ export AWS_SECRET_KEY=YYY

$ gt_upload_large image-backups /mnt/tower/backups/images-main-2010-20150617-2211.tar.xz images-main-2010-20150617-2211.tar.xz -em 11.33
Uploading: [/mnt/array/backups/images-main-2010-20150617-2211.tar.xz]
Size: (15.78) G
Start time: [2015-07-05 01:22:01]
Estimated duration: (3.17) hours => [2015-07-05 04:32:11] @ (11.33) Mbps
Archive ID: [IEGZ8uXToCDIgO3pMrrIHBIcJs...YyNlPigEwIR2NA]
Duration: (3.16) hours @ (11.37) Mbps

$ gt_upload_large image-backups /mnt/tower/backups/images-main-2011-20150617-2211.tar.xz images-main-2011-20150617-2211.tar.xz -em 11.37
Uploading: [/mnt/array/backups/images-main-2011-20150617-2211.tar.xz]
Size: (26.66) G
Start time: [2015-07-05 10:07:58]
Estimated duration: (5.33) hours => [2015-07-05 15:28:03] @ (11.37) Mbps

Notice that the output tells you the actual rate of the upload (the boto call that this uses doesn't provide a progress callback with which to provide realtime feedback). You can pass this value into the command for the next upload with the "-em" parameter to estimate the time-until-completion.

It's probably best to record the archive-IDs somewhere. It'll take you four-hours for an inventory request to be fulfilled (to get a list of your archives) and Amazon only updates its inventory of your archives every twenty-four hours (so you won't even be able to get one until the second day).