Archiving Amazon S3 Data to Amazon Glacier

AWS provides you with a number of data storage options. I’ve been using S3 with Arq for persona backups, and with AWS CLI tools all my servers. I have a rotation policy to keep 7 days, then a weekly backup for 4 weeks, and a monthly backup for 3 months … all working perfectly, but in reality I rarely use any of these old backups … so why not archiving them? It’s 10x cheaper to do so!

STANDARD - 99.999999999% durability. S3’s default storage option, starting at $0.125 per GB RRS - 99.99% durability. S3’s Reduced Redundancy Storage option, starting at $0.093 per GB GLACIER - 99.999999999% durability, object archived in Glacier option, starting at $0.010 per GB

Today I would like to focus on Amazon S3  and Amazon Glacier  and a new and powerful way for you to use both of them together.

Both of the services offer dependable and highly durable storage for the Internet. Amazon S3 was designed for rapid retrieval. Glacier, in contrast, trades off retrieval time for cost, providing storage for as little at $0.01 per Gigabyte per month while retrieving data within three to five hours.

How would you like to have the best of both worlds? How about rapid retrieval of fresh data stored in S3, with automatic, policy-driven archiving to lower cost Glacier storage as your data ages, along with easy, API-driven or console-powered retrieval?

Sound good? Awesome, because that’s what we have! You can now use Amazon Glacier as a storage option for Amazon S3.