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Amazon S3 Glacier

Score9.1 out of 10

34 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Amazon S3 Glacier?

The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing a low cost archive storage in the cloud. According to AWS, S3 Glacier storage classes provide virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability, and they provide fast access to archive data and low cost.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Amazon S3 Glacier.
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Here is the solution for data archive, backup, restoring, cost efficient and good retrival

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Recently we had an incident where we had security breach and data was deleted by the intruders. So our client wanted to have a backup solution where they can backup all their files as they're in banking/financing sector and those data is very crucial to them. For this I suggested them S3 Glacier as most of our deployment is AWS centric only. So we decided to got with S3 Glacier and we are backing up S3 into Glacier. With this the cost is also reduced to save objects.

Pros

  • We can setup the triggers and lifecycle process of objects to archive or backup to Glacier from S3 buckets.
  • Easy to integrate with other AWS services and access with keys
  • Till now we have only tested the backup restoring process with less data but it is fast and easy
  • Cost efficient when we compare with other vendors

Cons

  • Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing
  • Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well.
  • While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark.

Return on Investment

  • With this now we are storing data for less cost as compare to what we were paying earlier
  • Increased the data access limits

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud Storage

Other Software Used

Kubernetes

When used with a few software and hardware tools, Glacier makes an excellent long-term cloud archive service

Incentivized
Patrick Plaisance
CTO (Chief Technical Officer) in Information Technology at Pachyderm Consulting (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • Slight negative - another backup cost in addition to their existing BCDR solutions.
  • Positive - the overall cost is low, and for nonprofit customers, AWS offers an annual credit through TechSoup that can offset a lot of the cost.
  • Positive - staff no longer needs to shuttle large, heavy external storage devices offsite as an offsite backup.

Alternatives Considered

Datto, Acronis Backup, Carbonite Server Backup, CloudBerry Backup and eFolder Backup

Other Software Used

CloudBerry Backup, Datto, TeamViewer

The only Glacier that will still exist in 10 years

Incentivized
Gavin HackelingView profile
Data Scientist in Engineering at Wonder (AskWonder.com) (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
  • Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
  • Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.

Other Software Used

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon CloudWatch

Glacier- inaccessible storage

Incentivized
Dylan CauwelsView profile
DevOps Engineer in Engineering at CBRE (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • 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

Return on Investment

  • Allowed us to meet compliance standards as cheaply as possible.
  • We can store more legacy data for the same budget now, giving our teams more resources to use in case they need them.

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Other Software Used

AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, IntelliJ IDEA

Great service for companies already using S3 and other AWS services

Incentivized
Jeff StockampView profile
Principal Systems Administrator in Information Technology at Concur (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Pricing for retrieval of large objects is too high.

Return on Investment

  • Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
  • Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.

Other Software Used

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Web Services