Amazon S3 Glacier vs Amazon S3

Likelihood to Recommend

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

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Patrick Plaisance

CTO (Chief Technical Officer)

Pachyderm ConsultingInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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I've used S3 continuously for projects large and small for over 10 years. It's just such a common and essential tool in software development. Hosting assets/images, or providing file upload abilities to users, come up very often throughout software, and S3 is hands-down the best place to serve and store files. It's flexible enough that you can use client libraries to perform direct uploads rather than writing your own handlers, etc. S3 is a tool that immediately has value for file hosting and storage, and then extends as far as you need it to for all manner of asset management.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Pros

Cheap storage of backup data.
Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

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Rytis Slatkevičius

Owner

IĮ "Technologica Ecliptica"Computer Software, 1-10 employees

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Highly available and redundant; we do not worry about the service having downtime
Simple usage from multiple different frameworks using Amazon's SDKs, or roll your own
A large number of bucket policies and security adjustments to tailor usage to customer needs
Regional support for storing assets in particular locations around the world

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Joshua Dickson

Head of Engineering

Jock MKTComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Cons

Accessing data stored in Glacier is slow. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it is undesirable nonetheless.
Retrieving a large amount of data can be expensive; Glacier's intended use is as an archive of rarely-accessed data.
Some users regard Glacier with fear and uncertainty. Slow retrieval time and high retrieval cost are the greatest risks of using Glacier, and they are also the Glacier interaction that most users have the least experience with.

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Gavin Hackeling

Data Scientist

Wonder (AskWonder.com)Research, 11-50 employees

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No support for object versions retention: There can be a retention policy(days or number) for object versions that are stored in S3 so that we don't have to worry about paying extra for all the old versions of an object in the bucket.
No feature for replication within a region: Currently AWS does not support replication within a region. Also, having to enable versioning for buckets in which you need replication makes it even more costly.
Confusing pricing: The pricing model of S3 can be a little confusing for a new customer with questions regarding data transfer from other AWS services, between buckets or data transfer to the outside world.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 201-500 employees

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Usability

Amazon S3 Glacier 6.0

Based on 1 answer

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

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Rytis Slatkevičius

Owner

IĮ "Technologica Ecliptica"Computer Software, 1-10 employees

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Amazon S3 7.2

Based on 6 answers

The AWS S3 API is translated into every language you can think of, and is very powerful. However, the split of features into the AWS CLI -> S3 and AWS CLI -> S3API causes some confusion when dealing with complex uploading and metadata.

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Jonathan Kempf, UXC

Lead Frontend Engineer

MaisonetteApparel & Fashion, 11-50 employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Amazon S3 8.9

Based on 21 answers

Overall, Amazon S3 has worked out great for our organization. It has enabled us to build out a centralized storage solutions for fraction of the cost that a on-prem solution would have required. If properly managed S3 is a great asset to any organization. There a few small things that need improvement like the UI and storage monitoring but over it's been great.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Media Production Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.

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Verified User

Employee in Marketing

Retail Company, 11-50 employees

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Return on Investment

Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.

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Jeff Stockamp

Principal Systems Administrator

ConcurInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.

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Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect

InfostretchInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon S3 Glacier Editions & Modules

Edition

Storage Pricing	$0.004¹
Expedited Retrieval Pricing	$0.03¹
Retrieval Pricing	$0.01¹
Bulk Retrieval Pricing	$0.0025¹

Per GB Per Month

Additional Pricing Details

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General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon S3 Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—