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Getting Started with Amazon Glacier

You store data in Amazon Glacier as archives. An archive can represent a single file or you may choose to combine several files to be uploaded as a single archive. Retrieving archives from Amazon Glacier requires the initiation of a job. Jobs typically complete in 3 to 5 hours. You organize your archives in vaults. You can control access to your vaults using the Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) service.

To use Amazon Glacier you simply:

• Use the AWS Management Console or the Amazon Glacier APIs to create vaults. You use vaults to organize the archives you upload to Glacier.
• Use the simple Amazon Glacier APIs to upload and retrieve archives.
• Monitor the status of your Amazon Glacier jobs using the Amazon Glacier APIs. You can also, optionally, configure your vault to send you a notification via the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) when your jobs complete.
• Pay for what you use. Your monthly bill is based on the amount of data stored and transferred.

For more information, please visit the Amazon Glacier Getting Started video or the Amazon Glacier Developer Guide.

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Service Highlights

Low cost – Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. With Amazon Glacier, there are no upfront capital commitments and all ongoing operational expenses are included in the price. You save money by paying only for what you use.

Secure – Amazon Glacier supports secure transfer of your data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys. You can also control access to your data using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM enables organizations with multiple employees to create and manage multiple users under a single AWS account and to set resource-based access policies.

Durable – Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive. The service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. To increase durability, Amazon Glacier synchronously stores your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives. Unlike traditional systems which can require laborious data verification and manual repair, Glacier performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.

Flexible – Amazon Glacier scales to meet your growing and often unpredictable storage requirements. There is no limit to the amount of data you can store in the service. Whether you’re storing petabytes or gigabytes, Glacier automatically scales your storage up or down as needed. In addition, you can choose to store your data in the Amazon Glacier Region that meets your regulatory, throughput, and geographic redundancy criteria.

Simple – Amazon Glacier allows you to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, and makes retaining data for long periods, whether measured in years or decades, especially simple. Amazon Glacier removes the need for complex and time-consuming capacity planning, ongoing negotiations with multiple hardware and software vendors, specialized training, and maintenance of offsite facilities or transportation of storage media to third party offsite locations. Traditional storage hardware is only supported for a limited number of years. With Amazon Glacier, customers no longer need to manage the expensive, time-consuming, and risky hardware and storage media migrations that are inevitable when your data retention period exceeds the lifetime of your storage hardware. Data uploaded to Amazon Glacier remains safely stored for as long as it is needed with no additional effort from customers.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) allows you to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using data lifecycle policies. You can also use AWS Import/Export to accelerate moving large amounts of data into Amazon Glacier using portable storage devices for transport.

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Pricing

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee.

Storage Pricing

Request Pricing

Data Transfer Pricing

The pricing below is based on data transferred "in" to and "out" of Amazon Glacier.

Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead.

Rate tiers take into account your aggregate usage for Data Transfer Out to the Internet across Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Storage Gateway.

US Standard US East (N. Virginia) US West (Oregon) Asia Pacific (Sydney) South America (Sao Paulo) Standard Storage Reduced Redundancy Storage Glacier Storage Glacier Archive and Restore Requests Glacier Data Restores Glacier Storage is not available in all regions. Delete Requests Free Data Transfer** Requests Designed for 99.999999999% Durability Designed for 99.99% Durability per GB First 1 TB / month Next 49 TB / month Next 350 TB / month Next 450 TB / month Next 500 TB / month Next 4000 TB / month Next 524 TB / month Next 4 PB / month Greater than 5 PB / month Over 5000 TB / month All data transfer in PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST Requests Pricing Data Transfer IN Data Transfer OUT Data Transfer IN To Amazon S3 Data Transfer OUT From Amazon S3 To Internet Data Transfer OUT From Amazon S3 To Data Transfer IN To Amazon Glacier Data Transfer OUT From Amazon Glacier To Internet Data Transfer OUT From Amazon Glacier To All data transfer in Amazon EC2 in the Northern Virginia Region Amazon EC2 in the same region Another AWS Region or Amazon CloudFront Another AWS Region First 1 GB / month Up to 10 TB / month Next 40 TB / month Next 100 TB / month Greater than 150 TB / month All data transfer in GET and all other Requests per  1,000 requests per 10,000 requests US Standard US East (N. Virginia) US West (Oregon) South America (Sao Paulo) Free per GB / month UPLOAD and RETRIEVAL Requests LISTVAULTS, GETJOBOUTPUT, DELETE† and all other Requests Data Retrievals Pricing GET and all other Requests per 1,000 requests

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Transferring Large Amounts of Data

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity. You can use AWS Import/Export for migrating data into the cloud, distributing content to your customers, sending backups to AWS, and disaster recovery.

AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a high-bandwidth, dedicated network connection from your premise to AWS. With AWS Direct Connect, you can transfer your business critical data directly from your datacenter into AWS, bypassing your Internet service provider and removing network congestion. Further, AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to scale your connection to meet your data transfer needs. AWS Direct Connect provides 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections, and you can easily provision multiple connections if you need more capacity.

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Common Use Cases

Amazon Glacier can be used to support a wide variety of use cases, for example:

Organizations are archiving more and more data, driven by business and regulatory needs and the increasing amount of data they produce. Examples include email, legal records, and financial and business documents. This data is often retained for years or decades, but is accessed infrequently. Amazon Glacier allows you to cost-effectively and securely store enterprise data offsite, making it simple, inexpensive and safe to retain archived data for as long as desired. The service’s extremely low storage cost enables you to retain data that may be of future value, but that otherwise may have been discarded in order to reduce costs or to make room for additional data. Businesses and organizations of any size can use Amazon Glacier to reduce their storage costs and free up their primary storage infrastructure.
Media companies’ core assets are their content which includes books, movies, music, images, news footage, and TV shows. The number and size of these assets continues to grow, driven by new production and new technologies such as high-definition TV, social media and 3D video. These assets can grow to tens or hundreds of petabytes. Safely and securely storing these assets is of critical importance. Data accessibility is also critical. For example, certain archival news footage can suddenly become valuable based on unfolding events. Archiving media has traditionally required costly, multi-site, redundant data centers and offsite vaulting. Amazon Glacier reduces the cost of storing these assets while simultaneously increasing the durability, ease of use, and accessibility of the content. Accessing media files in Amazon Glacier is as simple as making calls to the service’s APIs. Customers don’t need to worry about transporting storage media from offsite facilities in order to restore data.
Research and scientific organizations, such as pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies, as well as universities and research institutes, have large data archiving needs. An example use-case is drug development, where a substantial amount of data is generated and must be retained so researchers can verify experimental drug test results. Traditionally, this data has been stored on inflexible tape-based storage systems with copies stored in multiple sites and often with a copy vaulted offsite as well. Amazon Glacier reduces the cost of storing these data sets by eliminating the operational overhead involved in managing hardware and data centers. The service automatically stores redundant data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility and is built to be automatically self-healing, performing regular, systematic data integrity checks and using redundant data to perform automatic repairs if errors are discovered.
Digital preservationists in organizations such as libraries, historical societies, non-profit organizations and governments are increasing their efforts to preserve valuable but aging digital content such as websites, software source code, video games, user-generated content and other digital artifacts that are no longer readily available. These archive volumes may start small, but can grow to petabytes over time. Amazon Glacier makes highly durable, cost-effective storage accessible for data volumes of any size. This contrasts with traditional data archiving solutions that require large scale and accurate capacity planning in order to be cost-effective.

Amazon Glacier can replace on-premise or offsite tape libraries. Although magnetic tape-based storage can be cost-effective when operated at scale, it can be a drain on resources as one (or more) tape libraries need to be maintained (often in geographically distinct locations) requiring specialized personnel, and taking up valuable space in data centers. In addition, the tapes themselves must be carefully stored and managed, which can include periodically copying data from old tapes onto new ones to ensure that your data can still be read as tape technology standards evolve. Replacing your tape library with Amazon Glacier removes the burden of managing these operational challenges. Entire data sets can be moved from tape libraries into Amazon Glacier, a process that can be economically accelerated by using AWS Import / Export.

Tape’s low cost potential also requires accurate capacity planning, a process that is usually error-prone, especially when storage growth is unpredictable, as it often is. Over provisioning capacity can result in under utilization and higher costs, while under provisioning can trigger expensive hardware upgrades far earlier than planned. Even when capacity planning is accurate, periodic hardware upgrades are still common as older tape libraries are less efficient and therefore costlier to operate. You can avoid investing in tape library upgrades, whether driven by capacity constraints or a technology refresh, and instead simply start storing data in Amazon Glacier. In doing so, you avoid the need for large upfront capital and expensive multi-year support commitments. With Amazon Glacier, you pay only for the capacity you use eliminating the need for capacity planning.

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Resources

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Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement