Amazon Glacier Help

I've just set up an Amazon Glacier account. It has taken me forever to do this as I find all of the information about it to be so confounding with regards to pricing.

So, I've got the account set up. I've got a vault set up, and I've got the retrieval rate set to "Free Tier Only."

Now I have to start uploading files. I'm pretty sure I can do this from my Qnap NAS, but if I do it from my NAS I have to upload the individual files as I don't have room on my NAS to store .ZIP files for everything I'm uploading. I'd have to do a few ZIP files at a time.

I can create .ZIP files on an external harddrive and upload the .ZIP files to the vault. But, I think I can only do this through the web interface if I do it this way? I can't seem to find an application that will run on Windows or Mac to upload to Glacier.

I think I read that the ZIP files are limited to 4GB in size? That would make zipping the files tough, as I can have a lot more than 4GB of RAW files from one hockey game.

I read somewhere that the number of files uploaded has an effect on the cost. But then I think I read somewhere else that it is the total data used that one is charged for. I want to do this as inexpensively as possible. I have 2.5TB of RAW files to upload.

I would love some suggestions as to how best to approach this.

No point zipping, images are typically highly compressed so no gain. Just create the glacier vault (may have the term wrong) and add the images. ZIP files more likely to corrupt than individual images, but Glacier and Internet both very reliable these days. Not sure how you do upload from a NAS.

Windows software here.

They charge for data stored. Be careful downloading, it can be VERY expensive due to the way it works - downloading a small amount can be stupidly expensive - story here.

I'm an Amazon certified solution architect, so qualified and happy to steer you in the right direction. I haven't used Glacier much myself, but happy to poke around, read docs, and translate from tech to English for you.

Thank you, Tim!

I got all distracted by a couple of projects I've been dealing with and forgot about Amazon Glacier for the time being.

I will see about setting up my Qnap to upload individual images, and if I have any questions I'll consult with you.

Glacier seems to work with "vaults" or similar, you NAS will have to support Glacier directly for it to work. I only tried it once and it was a bit weird.