Tar everything and send it up. And then do an incremental backup
Amazon charges per operation, reduce the number of operations
Disclaimer: I work at Google on Compute Engine, but not on GCS.
> KB: 1,024 bytes, expressed as 2^10
Why not just use KiB? Unlike KB, it's unambiguously binary.
It is useful for keeping archives of massive data you're unlikely to ever need, but legally obliged to keep around, or just want to have available for a very improbable later examination. Think some huge transaction logs of two years back.
For a case like this, you don't need fast retrieval, and mostly you don't need retrieval at all. You plan ahead to only ever retrieve a small percent of these data. The rest will be silently discarded when retention period has expired.
If your use case is not like that, Glacier probably makes little sense for you.
This is totally not a backup which you likely keep in order to restore the entire state from as soon as possible.
No additional metadata, but you get charged at least for 128 KB . Luckily lifecycle transition doesn't move files smaller than 128 KB. However, even using lifecycle transition you pay $0.01 per 1000 transitions. It doesn't seem much but for smaller items it can decrease savings a lot. E.g. if you average file is 6 MB, than you will loose 4 days of savings on S3 IA comparing to standard class.
