Amazon Web Services provide several options for cloud storage including AWS S3 and AWS Glacier. AWS Glacier is a cheaper archival and it takes 3-5 hours to make an archive available. In comparison to Amazon Glacier, archive service, AWS S3 enables faster retrieval of stored objects. AWS allow you to set the Glacier archive and retrieval policies for S3 objects.

This guide shows how you can set a policy to archive S3 objects on Glacier and to restore it back.

1. Login to your Amazon AWS account UI console. and enter S3 section tab.

Archive

2. Below is a listing of a sample bucket, named “copy-data-glacier”.

[Usage Configuration and Policy Analysis - Newvem S3 analytics helps you define, configure, implement and validate your storage policies. Use Newvem to validate your S3 storage structure and policies. Learn more about Newvem analytics features]

3. Select the bucket “Properties” and enter the tab “Lifecycle” in the properties box. Click “Add Rule” (to add a rule to archive data to Glacier).

4. In the prefix either specify the name of the file or the name of the folder which you want to archive. To enable the archival policy, click “Add Transition”. The “Add Expiration” button will set the rule for object expiration as explained here.

5. For “Time Period Format”, select the option “Days from the creation date”. It requires to enter the number of days S3 should wait from object’s creation date before archiving an object to Glacier. Provide an integer number.

6. If “Date” option is selected in “Time Period Format”, S3 will require a date on which the object will be archived to Glacier.

7. If you want to archive object immediately, enter days as “0”. As shown below, for the folder “CFGuide” in the bucket we have set a rule for Amazon S3 to immediately transition all objects of the folder to the Glacier storage class.

8. The above policy may not move the object immediately to Glacier but it will move them to the Glacier storage class when the Glacier process is executed, once a day.

9. The rules, once set for a bucket, will be available for modification under the “Lifecycle” tab of the bucket.

10. If you want to modify the rule, click “Modify” and edit the rule.

11. When the Glacier process will run it will archive the object of the folder specified into Glacier.

12. After archival, the Storage class of an object will change to Glacier.

13. The above object will not appear in any vault on the Glacier console and will be visible only from S3 console. They will be charged as per Glacier storage since their Storage class is Glacier.

Restore

14. To restore the archived object select one of the objects (archives) from the list shown in step #12 and right click. Click “Initiate Restore”.

15. On the pop up page, provide the number of days you want the archive to be available. Click “Ok” to start the restore process.

16. Once the restore process is started, and until the archive is available for restore it will show “Restoration in Progress” as marked below. Usually it takes 3-5 hours to complete the process.

17. Once the object is restored, the status under “Properties” will display the date until which that object will be available in RRS (Reduced Redundancy Storage).

[Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) and Glacier Opportunities - Newvem S3 analysis helps identify storage migration opportunities and supports migration actions. Learn more about Newvem]

Keywords: Amazon web services, Amazon AWS console, AWS S3, Amazon Cloud Services, AWS Management Console, AWS Glacier, S3 Standard Storage, IAM, S3 Usage, Access Policy, RRS Storage, Storage Objects, Archive, Restore