I am trying to better understand the options for using Backup Exec with Amazon Glacier.
Although it seems to be suggested that the Amazon iSCSI "Virtual Tape Shelf" should be used, I am finding that this is a less than desirable solution because Amazon itself requires that the virtual tapes be no smaller than 100 gigabytes.
This means that even if we have to restore just a 100 kilibyte file, we have to retrieve 100 gig of data from Glacier to access that file. There is no cost to restore from Glacier to their regular S3 storage but then we have to incur the costs of the regular S3 storage for that 100gig virtual tape brought in from Glacier during the restore.
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Is it possible to instead establish a disk based backup store using Amazon Glacier? With a disk based backup to Glacier, I could choose the size of the archive files, so it can be perhaps 100 megabytes or 10 megabytes per backup data file.
Though it is unclear to me how Backup Exec would be able to automatically interact with Glacier to request files for restore, and then have Backup Exec wait the required 5-12 hours needed for Glacier to fulfill the restore request.
