Amazon S3 provides the most cost effective pricing of $1/TB for Glacier Deep Archive storage class. It is too good to be true. But, it comes with a drawback that when you need your data you will have to pay a lot. It is like a cheap hard drive on which you can easily store your data, but when hard drive becomes corrupt you have to pay good money for recovery.

As I store everything in Dropbox, I had to take backups of very old data which is hardly going to be used in a near future. To do that, used Dropbox Transfer to create links of zip files of a limited 100GB each. Then I used rclone to do a direct transfer (no local storing) of these zip file links to Amazon S3. And not just that, added 64 bit encryption keys also to the rclone configuration. So, when rclone receives the link it creates a direct stream from Dropbox to Encryption and directly to Amazon S3. Beautiful! Isn’t it?

Here is one line you can use to start direct backup:

rclone -Pv copyurl $REMOTE_FILE_URL glacier_encrypted:$REMOTE_FOLDER/$REMOTE_FILE_NAME

-P stands for “show progress”, so you will see what is happening and how much amount of data is being processed.

glacier_encrypted is the encrypted location on amazon glacier configured in rclone. So, first configure a normal connection to Amazon S3 and then create another encrypted location connection over it.