Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Services) is a type of AWS cloud S3 service. Amazon S3 service is a low-cost, secure, and durable cloud storage service for long-term backup.

It is quite an effective solution for keeping prolonged unused data for a long time. It is a nice choice company that possesses a lot of not-so-often unused electronic documents and keeps its rarely used and outdated electronic documentation.

Amazon S3 glacier provides three different archive storage classes based on their access pattern and storage duration. These storage classes are as follows:

1. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
2. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
3. S3 Glacier Deep Achieve

1. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: Use for archiving data that is rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval. It has a minimum storage duration of 90 days.

2. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: Use archives where portions of the data might need to be retrieved in minutes. This recovers large amounts of data in a 5 to 12 hours window, this is the lowest cost option. Expedited(1 to 5 minutes), Standard(t to 5 hours), Bulk which is free(5 to 12 hours). It also has a minimum storage duration of 90 days.

3. S3 Glacier Deep Archive: Deep Archive which is meant for long-term storage. So, we have two tiers of retrieval – Standard(132 hours), and Bulk(48 hours). It is used for archiving data that rarely need to be accessed. Data stored in the S3 Glacier Deep Achieve storage class has a default retrieval time of 12 hours.

Users have to set up jobs to download archives or archive lists in vault snapshots. These jobs run in the background and usually take several hours to complete. There are two ways to upload data –

1. Upload to glacier from the user’s instance
2. Using Amazon S3 lifecycle policies to move data from S3 to Glacier.

Pre-requisites:  AWS

Amazon S3 is an object storage service that stores data as objects within buckets. A bucket is like a folder available in S3  that stores the files. Amazon S3 provides many features such as Storage class, Storage Management, Access Management, and many more. Amazon S3 glacier is one of the S3 storage classes.