S3 Glacier

• Archival Storage Tiers:

  • S3 Glacier is used for long-term infrequently accessed data.

  • S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage option for archival data that is rarely accessed (e.g., once or twice a year).

• Use Cases:

  • Ideal for compliance, digital preservation, backups, media archives, and long-term retention.

• Storage Classes:

  • S3 Glacier (retrieval in minutes to hours)

  • S3 Glacier Deep Archive (retrieval in hours)

• Retrieval Options for Glacier:

  • Expedited: 1–5 minutes (small data, premium cost)

  • Standard: 3–5 hours

  • Bulk: 5–12 hours (lowest cost)

• Retrieval Options for Glacier Deep Archive:

  • Standard: 12 hours

  • Bulk: 48 hours

• No Lifecycle Transition Delay:

  • Objects moved via S3 lifecycle policies are immediately placed into the Glacier tier; retrieval delays apply only when accessing them.

• S3 Intelligent-Tiering:

  • Can automatically move data to Archive Access or Deep Archive Access tiers to optimize costs, without retrieval charges for access patterns.

• Restore Process:

  • Glacier objects must be restored before access; a temporary copy is made available in the S3 Standard tier for the specified duration.

• Object Lock and Compliance:

  • Supports WORM (Write Once, Read Many) for regulatory compliance using S3 Object Lock.

• Data Retrieval Cost Model:

  • You pay for storage, retrieval, and data transfer out.

  • Retrieval charges vary by the retrieval method and amount of data.

• Vaults vs. Buckets:

  • Classic Glacier (before S3 integration) used vaults; now S3 Glacier uses S3 buckets with Glacier storage class.

• Glacier Archives:

  • In classic Glacier (vaults), each file is stored as an archive with a unique ID.

• Lifecycle Policies:

  • Use S3 Lifecycle rules to automate transitions to Glacier tiers based on object age or prefixes.

• Data Durability:

  • Offers 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability like S3 Standard.

• Cross-Region Replication Support:

  • S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) can be configured with Glacier tiers to replicate archived data across AWS Regions for compliance and DR.