Arq, the great backup utility for OS X that utilizes Amazon S3 for storage, received an update that supports Amazon’s new Glacier service.

From the Haystack Software Blog:

Arq now backs up to Amazon’s new Glacier service, and I’m really excited about it! Glacier storage is super-cheap — just $.01/GB per month!

With Glacier you can store 100GB for just $1/month! Or store a terabyte for just $10/month!

I got hundreds of emails and tweets asking for Glacier support. Turns out it’s a good option for some scenarios (even with the slow restore time and possible extra Amazon charges). People want to use it for big stuff like iPhoto libraries, videos, etc that get too expensive in S3. They use it as a secondary backup, so they don’t expect to actually restore unless their whole house burns down, taking their primary backup with it.

The price of Glacier is so low that I am looking at using it for an archival service. Originally I was thinking that it would be good to keep backups on it, but the retrieval rates for your data are fairly steep making it a pain/expensive to restore files. But, for storing old data that you do not need access to all of the time makes Glacier very attractive.