When used with a few software and hardware tools, Glacier makes an excellent long-term cloud archive service
Amazon Glacier is in use by several of my clients for long-term, "low-touch" storage of archival data. The main use is by media …
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What is Amazon S3 Glacier?
The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing a low cost archive storage in the cloud. According to AWS, S3 Glacier storage classes provide virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data…
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What is Amazon S3 Glacier?
The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing a low cost archive storage in the cloud. According to AWS, S3 Glacier storage classes provide virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability, and they provide fast access to archive data and low cost.
The user chooses from three archive storage classes optimized for different access patterns and storage duration. For archive data that needs immediate access, such as medical images, news media assets, or genomics data, can use the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class, an archive storage class that delivers a low cost storage with milliseconds retrieval. For archive data that does not require immediate access but needs the flexibility to retrieve large sets of data at no cost, such as backup or disaster recovery use cases, choose S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier), with retrieval in minutes or free bulk retrievals in 5-12 hours. To save more on long-lived archive storage such as compliance archives and digital media preservation, S3 Glacier Deep Archive presents an option.
Amazon S3 Glacier Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
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July 07, 2019
When used with a few software and hardware tools, Glacier makes an excellent long-term cloud archive service
Amazon Glacier is in use by several of my clients for long-term, "low-touch" storage of archival data. The main use is by media departments to backup large quantities of archival media such as photos, videos, and audio recordings. Amazon Glacier is used because of the extraordinarily low cost of storage compared to other cloud storage services.
- Extremely low cost. Most major cloud storage providers don't compete in this field.
- Snowball device for data transfer works perfectly for transferring huge amounts of data to Amazon Glacier.
- Works in concert with CloudBerry Backup for continuous backup once initial backup seeded by Snowball.
- Compared to other cloud storage providers, even Amazon's S3 service, interfacing with Amazon Glacier is complex.
- While the Snowball device is a boon for transferring data to Amazon Glacier, at the time that I used it, it was a command-line only affair. While the actual commands were simple, the logging and reporting provided by the device made me nervous I hadn't captured all of our data to the device. Once Amazon received it back and transferred from the Snowball to Glacier, it turns out I had transferred everything.
- Amazon also accepts external hard drives for seeding Glacier backups. However, we've had several that we felt matched all of their requirements, but the seeding failed without a satisfactory explanation from Amazon.
- If you plan to access/restore data from Amazon Glacier regularly, the cost and complexity become a problem. Truthfully, if you're looking for cloud STORAGE and not cloud ARCHIVE, you should look elsewhere.
- Slight negative - another backup cost in addition to their existing BCDR solutions.
- Positive - the overall cost is low, and for nonprofit customers, AWS offers an annual credit through TechSoup that can offset a lot of the cost.
- Positive - staff no longer needs to shuttle large, heavy external storage devices offsite as an offsite backup.
Amazon Glacier isn't a direct competitor to the products I've listed; it could compare to the clouds/data warehouses each of these products use to store their data. In the case of CloudBerry, Amazon Glacier is used with it to create a complete archival backup system. That said, when using Amazon Glacier along with a product like CloudBerry, you can create a reliable, inexpensive cloud backup system for retaining HUGE quantities of data for much less than these other cloud backup solutions.
HOWEVER, if you want to restore said data, the cost and complexity begin to become a major concern, so Amazon Glacier should only be considered in situations where you don't plan to touch the data regularly, if at all, once it's at Glacier.
HOWEVER, if you want to restore said data, the cost and complexity begin to become a major concern, so Amazon Glacier should only be considered in situations where you don't plan to touch the data regularly, if at all, once it's at Glacier.
April 05, 2019
Glacier- inaccessible storage
We used it for long term storage solutions at a low cost. Generally, it's a backup solution for when we have legacy systems that are getting replaced by a newer application. We will throw all the associated data/files/information on the legacy application onto Glacier to be pulled out if we ever need to revamp it or reference the application for any reason.
- Low cost, long term storage is the marketed strength of Glacier and something that it does very well
- Great for storing data needed for compliance purposes without breaking the bank
- Storing data that you don't need but want to ensure is there if you ever do need it. I feel very safe putting data in Glacier given its (up to) 11 9's redundancy
- Having the option to pay to get the data back faster would be much appreciated, but given the price and the disclaimers given before storing this is an understandable inconvenience
- Setup can be a bit difficult in certain implementations as it requires a 3rd party client to transfer data into
- Support and download costs were higher than expected
- Allowed us to meet compliance standards as cheaply as possible.
- We can store more legacy data for the same budget now, giving our teams more resources to use in case they need them.
- Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Glacier is convenient with systems already on AWS and cheaper than S3 for data that needs to be accessed infrequently. A great tool for any team to use that has a legacy system or data.
September 29, 2016
Glacier - Simple, cheap long-term storage, for the data you *probably* don't need.
Glacier is an amazing way to start all the data you rarely need but have to store in case of emergency. It is being used by our technology department and allows us to keep massive amounts of files for very cheap, files we would rarely need but can't throw away.
- Very inexpensive
- Easy to transfer files
- 24/7 availablity
- Low availability
- Only access to files in small timeframes
- Inexpensive storage.
- Ease of mind to know you still have the data somewhere in case you need it.
- Set it and forget it (until you need it).
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Dropbox, Dropbox for Business, Google Cloud Storage, OneDrive and Box
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.
September 28, 2016
Great service for companies already using S3 and other AWS services
It's being used to archive infrastructure and application logs. These are being being pushed into Glacier by lifecycle policies on S3 Buckets. These objects are very rarely retrieved.
- Easy to implement, especially if you're using S3 lifecycle policies.
- Helps meet compliance requirements, especially when combined with vault lock policies.
- Very low cost.
- Pricing for retrieval of large objects is too high.
- Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
- Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.
The other alternatives for us would involve moving objects out of S3 to some other object storage services, which would generate a lot of network traffic, or keep the objects on more expensive storage.
We used Amazon Glacier to store backups of virtual machine images. A virtual machine image may take gigabytes and, considering that we made snapshots quite often, that would generate a lot of data very fast. Amazon Glacier turned out to be a cheap solution to store all that data.
- 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.
- Enumeration of data takes hours. In order to get data back you'll need to do inventory of the bucket, but that takes a few hours to complete.
- Data and bucket deletion also requires inventory. Moreover, it is not possible to delete a bucket that has been recently written to - making bucket deletion a lengthy ordeal: first, you perform inventory, then delete your files, but you cannot delete the bucket as you recently deleted files, so you have to wait for another day in order to delete the bucket itself.
- While data storage is cheap and easy, data retrieval can be expensive as you only get a download quota that is a few percent of your storage.
- Cheap backup storage - up to the level where it becomes only tiny fractions of your entire project, whereas other solutions would be much more expensive.
- The established reliability of AWS also makes you sleep better at night knowing your data is going to be OK.
It is significantly cheaper than other services, however, it is because it actually is a slightly different service. The other services we've tried allow live reading/writing of data as needed, whereas Glacier is a "cold storage" service. So essentially your choice ends up being based on what you plan to do with your data: keep it indefinitely or retrieve and modify it (potentially often and multiple times).
- Data storage
- Data retrieval, deletion and modification