Amazon S3 Now Supports Lifecycle Rules for Versioning

Posted on: May 20, 2014

Amazon S3 now supports lifecycle rules for versioning. This means that you can now use lifecycle rules for S3 buckets regardless of whether they are enabled for versioning or not.

Versioning provides protection against overwrites and deletes by enabling you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object in an Amazon S3 bucket. Lifecycle rules provide you the ability to configure rules that define what automatically happens to objects stored in your buckets after a specific date or period of time.

Now that lifecycle rules are supported for versioning, you can combine versioning and lifecycle rules to enable scenarios such as easily setting up a rule that stores all your previous object versions in the lower cost Glacier storage class and deletes them from Glacier storage after 100 days. This example would provide a 100 day window to roll back any changes made to your data and automatically lower your storage costs.

To learn more about configuring lifecycle rules with versioning, please review the Amazon S3 Developers Guide.