Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 18 vetted Amazon S3 Glacier reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-7 of 7)
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.
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
January 17, 2019
The only Glacier that will still exist in 10 years
My organization is required to retain application audit logs for several years. The engineering team at my organization uses Amazon Glacier to provide a simple, inexpensive and compliant log storage. It is easy to configure the lifecycles for our log buckets in S3 to automatically transition objects to the infrequent-access storage class, and eventually to Glacier.
- Glacier is an inexpensive solution to the problem of storing rarely-accessed data for years.
- You can configure S3 buckets to transition objects to Glacier with a few clicks.
- It is easy to get started with Glacier; there is little learning curve and few concepts to familiarize yourself with.
- 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.
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.
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.
March 27, 2017
Hedge Fund Employee's Amazon Glacier Review
We've only recently begun to use Amazon Glacier for larger parts of the company, but we've been using Amazon Glacier for portions of our storage for 3 years. It helps provide extra redundancy in our data storage and the fact that it can be accessed from anywhere is a huge plus.
- Globally accessible
- Inexpensive for the amount of data you can store compared to cost
- The name Amazon provides a lot of peace of mind
- Billing system isn't the smoothest to operate
- Recalling information from glacier can run slow depending on type of data
- Customer support
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
Amazon S3 Glacier Scorecard Summary
About Amazon S3 Glacier
Amazon Glacier is a low-cost cloud archiving and backup solution from Amazon Web Services.
Categories: Endpoint Backup, Archiving
Amazon S3 Glacier Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |