AWS Glacier - Basics

What is Amazon Glacier ?

Amazon glacier is another storage solution from Amazon. Its a secure low cost storage service mainly used for data archiving and backup. 

Glacier is optimised for infrequently accessed data where the retrieval time is slower, whereas S3 is meant to access frequently accessed data. A single archive file can be as large as 40 TB. 

Characteristics: 

• extremely low cost
• meant for storing archival data where retrieval is not frequent. 
• Secure: supports data transfer over SSL. 
• Durable: Your data is stored redundantly across multiple facilities. 
• Audit logs on the glacier data, who accessed what data. 

Uploading data to AWS: 

• AWS provides SDKs which help you in transferring large amount of data. 
• If you want to transfer large amount of data from your corporate network, you can use AWS Import / Export feature and AWS Direct Connect. 

Downloading data from Amazon: 

• Downloading a data is asynchronous operation. First AWS glacier prepares your archive which takes hours and then you have 24 hours to download the data from the staging location. 

How pricing works: 

You normally pay for the following

• Data storage (appxt. $0.01 per GB)
• Request
• Upload and retrieval request: $0.05 $ per 1000 requests. 
• Data transfer

Please find the up to date pricing information in this URL: 

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

More about Glacier can be found in this URL: