Amazon Glacier 2026 Overview: Pricing, Ratings & Details

1. About Amazon S3 Glacier
2. Pros of Amazon S3 Glacier
3. Cons of Amazon S3 Glacier
4. Breakdown of core features

Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure and durable service for low-cost data archiving and long-term backup. With S3 Glacier, users can store data for months, years, or decades. The solution offloads the administrative burdens of operating and scaling storage to AWS, so users don't have to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection and recovery, or time-consuming hardware migrations.

Amazon provides three S3 Glacier archive storage classes for different access patterns and storage duration: Instant Retrieval, Flexible Retrieval, and Deep Archive. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage delivers low-cost storage with milliseconds retrieval. In contrast, Flexible Retrieval handles archive data that does not require immediate access but needs the flexibility to retrieve large sets of data. S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers long-lived archive storage such as compliance archives and digital media preservation. These storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing high-performing archive storage in the cloud. All S3 Glacier storage classes support unlimited scalability and have 99.999999999% data durability.

Pros of Amazon S3 Glacier

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• S3 Glacier storage classes facilitate retrieval options from milliseconds to hours to fit different performance needs.
• The platform stores data redundantly across multiple Availability Zones physically separated within an AWS Region.

Cons of Amazon S3 Glacier

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• Data retrieval in Amazon S3 Glacier is time-consuming.

Breakdown of core features

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Vault operations

S3 Glacier streamlines various vault operations. Users can retrieve vault information such as the vault creation date, the number of archives in the vault, and the total size of all the archives in the vault. Vault operations are specific to particular AWS Regions. When users list vaults, S3 Glacier returns the vault list from the AWS Region that they specified in the request. An AWS account can create up to 1,000 vaults per AWS Region. S3 Glacier prepares an inventory for each vault periodically, every 24 hours.

Archive operations

Amazon S3 Glacier provides operations for users to upload, download, and delete archives. Each time the user uploads an archive, S3 Glacier generates a new archive ID. Users can upload an archive in a single operation or upload it in parts. Downloading archives on the platform is an asynchronous operation.

Access permission management

Access to S3 Glacier requires credentials that the system can use to authenticate requests. When granting permissions, admins or AWS account owners decide who is getting the permissions, the resources they get permissions for, and the specific actions admins or owners want to allow on those resources.

Logging and monitoring

AWS offers the following tools for monitoring S3 Glacier resources and responding to potential incidents: Amazon CloudWatch Alarms, CloudTrail Logs, and Trusted Advisor. Amazon CloudWatch alarms let users watch a single metric over a specified period. If the metric exceeds a given threshold, the software sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic or AWS Auto Scaling policy. CloudTrail records actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service in S3 Glacier. Trusted Advisor inspects the AWS environment and then makes recommendations when opportunities exist to save money, improve system availability and performance, or help close security gaps.