How to set up archive to Amazon S3 Glacier

  1. What is Amazon S3 Glacier
  2. cloudHQ with Amazon S3 Glacier
  3. How to configure your Amazon S3 bucket to use Amazon S3 Glacier

What is Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon S3 Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure, durable, and flexible storage for data backup and archival.

With Amazon S3 Glacier storage, customers can reliably store their data for as little as $0.007 per gigabyte per month. Amazon Glacier enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling storage to AWS, so they don’t have to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection, and repair, or time-consuming hardware migrations.

Amazon offers two Glacier-related storage classes under Amazon S3:
S3 Glacier

  • Use case: Archiving data that doesn’t need immediate access and which does not changes frequently (like cloudHQ_archive folder or similar).
  • Retrieval time: Minutes to hours (expedited, standard, or bulk retrieval options).
  • Cost: Low storage cost; retrieval incurs additional fees.

S3 Glacier Deep Archive

  • Use case: Long-term data archiving (e.g., 7–10 years) and and which does not changes frequently.
  • Retrieval time: Hours (12 hours or more).
  • Cost: Even lower than S3 Glacier; designed for data rarely retrieved.

cloudHQ with Amazon S3 Glacier

cloudHQ backup supports all S3 storage classes, but we highly recommend using Amazon S3 Standard as the default for your backup bucket. Backing up an Amazon S3 bucket where S3 Glacier Deep Archive or a similar storage class is set as the default is not recommended. If you want to use Amazon S3 Glacier or a similar storage class, set up a storage policy to automatically move files that have not changed in the last 3 months to S3 Glacier Deep Archive or a similar archive storage class.
In summary:

  1. Set your backup to Amazon S3 bucket which has use the S3 Standard storage class as default. This is for “hot data”—files changed within the last 3 months.
  2. Create a policy to automatically move cold data (files not changed for 3 months) to S3 Glacier Deep Archive or a similar class.
Important notes regarding cloudHQ setup:

  1. you should setup Glacier archiving for cloudHQ_archive folder – not for the destination folder.
  2. If you want to archive to Glacier the primary folder then you should disable the following two options for your backup:
    • Archive files before they are changed or deleted by sync
    • Automatically re-copy files if we detect tampering of copies on the target (you need to disable this because archive on Glacier will change the destination)

In summary, you should configure a rule for your storage buckets to automatically move files older than 3 months to Amazon S3 Glacier. This ensures that:

  1. Files that are frequently updated remain in the standard Amazon S3 storage,
  2. Files that hardly ever change are transferred to Amazon S3 Glacier,
  3. Old versions of files, stored in cloudHQ_archive, are also kept in Amazon S3 Glacier.

How to configure your Amazon S3 bucket to use Amazon S3 Glacier

Here are short instructions for how to set up an archive of your Amazon S3 backups to Amazon Glacier:

  1. Go to your Amazon S3 buckets and select a particular bucket:
    chrome extension
  2. Click Management:
    chrome extension
  3. There is no lifecycle rule applied to this bucket. Here is how to add lifecycle rule to automatically transition objects to the Glacier storage class. Click Add lifecycle rule:
    chrome extension
  4. Enter a rule name and choose a rule scope:
    chrome extension
  5. Configure expiration (the number of days from object creation):
    chrome extension
  6. Review configuration settings:
    chrome extension
  7. Lifecycle rule is added:
    chrome extension

    8. Here is a short video with the instructions for how to set up an archive from Amazon S3 to Amazon Glacier:

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