Amazon EFS Archive

Save up to 50% on cold, rarely-accessed file data

Amazon Elastic File Storage (Amazon EFS) provides serverless, fully elastic file storage that makes it simple to set up and run file workloads on AWS. Amazon EFS Archive is a storage class that is cost- optimized for cold, rarely-accessed data — giving you a cost-effective way to retain even your coldest data so that it’s always available to power new business insights. EFS Archive delivers storage prices up to 50% lower compared to the cost-optimized EFS Infrequent Access (IA) storage class, and up to 97% lower compared to the high-performance EFS Standard storage class. The EFS Archive storage class costs only $0.008/GB-month1.

EFS Archive is cost-optimized for long-lived file data that is accessed a few times a year or less. supports the same intelligent tiering experience as existing EFS storage classes, which means that you can now combine the sub-millisecond SSD latencies of Amazon EFS Standard for your active frequently -accessed data with the lower costs of Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (IA) and EFS Archive for your colder data. When needed, all your data—across EFS Standard, IA, and Archive storage classes—is accessible from a single EFS file system that’s automatically cost-optimized for a mix of active and inactive data.

To get started with Archive, simply enable Amazon EFS Lifecycle Management for your file system. EFS’s default, recommended policy will automatically transition your data across EFS Standard, IA, and Archive. Amazon EFS will automatically and transparently move your files to the lower cost EFS IA and Archive storage classes based on the last time they were accessed. Amazon EFS transparently serves files across all storage classes from a common file system namespace. You also don't have to worry about which of your files are actively used and which are infrequently accessed. Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering offers an additional lifecycle policy that moves files back to EFS Standard automatically when they are accessed.

1pricing in US East (N. Virginia) region

Use cases for EFS Archive storage class

EFS Archive cost-efficiently stores file data, with industry-leading availability, security and durability enabling you to meet regulatory retention and compliance needs so your backups are protected and available if needed.

Managing large volumes of data analytics can be complex and costly for workloads like genomics and geospatial applications. EFS Archive cost-efficiently stores large datasets while providing the same throughput used to scale applications with files stored in EFS Standard. If an analytics job is accessed later, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move this data to EFS Standard.

Business application's reporting systems rely on accessible shared file data to support business functions. With EFS Archive, you can easily and cost-effectively store and access files from shared file systems and eliminate the need to manage data just to control costs. When reports are accessed later, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move accessed reports to EFS Standard.

Content management systems and web serving applications store and serve media assets for websites, online publications, and archives. Assets like these are accessed less frequently after a
period of time when content ages. You can easily store these rarely accessed files in lower cost storage class like EFS Archive. When any of this content becomes active once again, it is quickly accessed, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move the accessed content to EFS Standard.

Data science workloads often rely on shared file storage to store machine learning training data and inference models. As this data ages, it can be cost-effectively stored in EFS Archive. For use cases with unknown or changing access patterns — such as when older document management reports are referenced or machine learning inference datasets are reused — EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move files to the appropriate storage class at the right time, based on file access patterns, ensuring your data is easily accessed again.