Amazon S3 Glacier

If you just want to store data for long time, like your data warehouse, from where you need to analyze for few times in a year or specific period of time, Amazon S3 Glacier is best option to store data for long time in extremely low cost.

Amazon S3 Glacier is not suitable if you constantly want to read and write data every day, because it provides service the way for its usage, as it provides this service at very low cost.

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.

Well suited for storing data that doesn't need to be accessed but needs to be kept for compliance or support reasons later on. If you have data that you will need to access quickly once you realize you need it, be sure to either choose the quick-retrieval option of Glacier that costs more or store it in S3. Needing data quickly and not being able to retrieve it is one of the worst situations you can find yourself in at the expense of saving a few bucks.

Glacier is perfect for some narrow use-cases, particularly for logging and regulatory compliance. For example, Glacier is ideal for archiving audit logs that are rarely accessed for several years. Glacier is very inexpensive for this use-case, and automatically transitioning objects from S3 buckets to Glacier after a few months is a breeze.

We have backed up all of our company's long-term data on Amazon Glacier and we've recently begun experimenting with setting up consultants' workspace on amazon glacier. This will allow us to keep a separation between core employees' work and temporary workers. As we keep expanding we are excited to see other ways we can leverage Glacier.

Amazon Glacier is great for any time you need to store files but do not want to use on site storage (costly) or S3 (cheaper but why pay for old, stale rarely used data?). Any time you have data but are not sure you will ever need to use it again, send it to Glacier for pennies a month.

It's great for objects that are already in AWS, like in S3. Moving objects from S3 to Glacier is very simple.

It would be difficult to consider Glacier outside of other AWS services. It's unlikely that someone would use AWS just for Glacier. It's great as part of the AWS ecosystem, but shouldn't really be deployed as a stand alone product.

As described in the use case, it is perfect for backup data storage where you do not expect to retrieve the data often. Think of it as a data dump; it is nice to know you have a backup, but it actually is expensive and somewhat difficult to retrieve everything.