The Most Expensive ClickHouse Query Is the Restore
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Self-hosted ClickHouse deployments typically rely on AWS S3 for backups and cold-tier storage, but AWS charges $0.09/GB for egress — making a 500 TB restore cost ~$45,000. The real hidden cost is that teams skip backup testing because restores are expensive. Tigris, an S3-compatible object storage service with zero egress fees, can replace S3 as the backup and cold-tier destination with no changes to ClickHouse configuration. The post covers using BACKUP TABLE and TTL-based tiering policies to move old partitions to Tigris, keeping hot data on NVMe. It also warns against zero-copy replication in open-source ClickHouse due to known metadata race conditions that have kept the feature disabled since version 22.8.
