So, yeah, I finally finished writing this. In terms of coding projects, this one has been the most challenging for a number of reasons. First, AWS Glacier is cold storage, which means that vault inventories and archive retrievals have (approximately) a four hour wait before further action can be taken. After the job completes, it only stays visible for 24 hours. As you might imagine, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve kicked off jobs for testing purposes, and then never got back to it due to family or work obligations. Second, those family and work obligations have been getting in the way. Most of the time, after the work day is done and the kids are asleep (providing I’m not on the road for work) I simply don’t want to sit in front of my laptop again. My brain is fried and wants a “bourbon, neat” for its troubles. 🙂
“Why did you do this?”, you might ask, and I would tell that 1.) I’m a nerd that likes to do nerdly things in order to keep the nerdly brain cells happy and well-exercised, and 2.) Glacier is a hell of a cool solution for my particular use case. Namely, “What the bloody hell do I do with 100’s of GBs (and more) of digital family photos and videos?!”
Usually, a service like Mozy/BackBlaze/Carbonite would be a suitable solution, but I store everything on a NAS and those silly companies usually pick NAS as the dividing line between consumer and business. The NAS I speak of is an Iomega ix-200, and if you’ve ever used one, you’re probably painfully aware that it’s a bit of a dog on the performance tip, so doing some fancy/lame thing like copying files off the NAS just to sync “to the cloud!” will eat up tons of local disk and be horribly slow. Slow as in, whenever it finishes, the zombie apocalypse will be upon us and I won’t care about digital photos anymore, just eating brains and trying to stay out of Rick Grimes‘ way.
Based on the above, even if I use the ever-loving hell out of Glacier, with the currently available, pricing I’ll never use more than a couple dollars a month. Pretty awesome, I think. OK, you’ve tolerated me long enough.
The code is up on Ye Olde Github here: https://github.com/sixfootdad/AWS-Glacier-SNS-PowerShell.
Be sure to check out the README and holler if you have any querstions.
Great script, but I have an enhanced need to run this using an IAM role. This required I also provide the security token. I don’t see a means to do that in the script as it exists. L’il help? I’ll try to work it in myself but wanted to know if you already had that piece sorted.
Thanks,
D