Amazon S3 Glacier Reviews & Insights

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.

If you have data that is more suited for archiving and not for frequent retrieval for operations or backup then you can go for it. Although retrieval is fast but it costs too much as compare to keep them on storage of S3. You must have well managed IT team to manage such AWS services. Good if you have to auto archive objects from S3.

Amazon Glacier is in use by several of my clients for long-term, "low-touch" storage of archival data. The main use is by media departments to backup large quantities of archival media such as photos, videos, and audio recordings. Amazon Glacier is used because of the extraordinarily low cost of storage compared to other cloud storage services.

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup Cloudberry backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

We used it for long term storage solutions at a low cost. Generally, it's a backup solution for when we have legacy systems that are getting replaced by a newer application. We will throw all the associated data/files/information on the legacy application onto Glacier to be pulled out if we ever need to revamp it or reference the application for any reason.

Well suited for storing data that doesn't need to be accessed but needs to be kept for compliance or support reasons later on. If you have data that you will need to access quickly once you realize you need it, be sure to either choose the quick-retrieval option of Glacier that costs more or store it in S3. Needing data quickly and not being able to retrieve it is one of the worst situations you can find yourself in at the expense of saving a few bucks.

My organization is required to retain application audit logs for several years. The engineering team at my organization uses Amazon Glacier to provide a simple, inexpensive and compliant log storage. It is easy to configure the lifecycles for our log buckets in S3 to automatically transition objects to the infrequent-access storage class, and eventually to Glacier.

Glacier is perfect for some narrow use-cases, particularly for logging and regulatory compliance. For example, Glacier is ideal for archiving audit logs that are rarely accessed for several years. Glacier is very inexpensive for this use-case, and automatically transitioning objects from S3 buckets to Glacier after a few months is a breeze.

We've only recently begun to use Amazon Glacier for larger parts of the company, but we've been using Amazon Glacier for portions of our storage for 3 years. It helps provide extra redundancy in our data storage and the fact that it can be accessed from anywhere is a huge plus.

We have backed up all of our company's long-term data on Amazon Glacier and we've recently begun experimenting with setting up consultants' workspace on amazon glacier. This will allow us to keep a separation between core employees' work and temporary workers. As we keep expanding we are excited to see other ways we can leverage Glacier.

Glacier is an amazing way to start all the data you rarely need but have to store in case of emergency. It is being used by our technology department and allows us to keep massive amounts of files for very cheap, files we would rarely need but can't throw away.

Amazon Glacier is great for any time you need to store files but do not want to use on site storage (costly) or S3 (cheaper but why pay for old, stale rarely used data?). Any time you have data but are not sure you will ever need to use it again, send it to Glacier for pennies a month.

It's being used to archive infrastructure and application logs. These are being being pushed into Glacier by lifecycle policies on S3 Buckets. These objects are very rarely retrieved.

It's great for objects that are already in AWS, like in S3. Moving objects from S3 to Glacier is very simple.

It would be difficult to consider Glacier outside of other AWS services. It's unlikely that someone would use AWS just for Glacier. It's great as part of the AWS ecosystem, but shouldn't really be deployed as a stand alone product.

We used Amazon Glacier to store backups of virtual machine images. A virtual machine image may take gigabytes and, considering that we made snapshots quite often, that would generate a lot of data very fast. Amazon Glacier turned out to be a cheap solution to store all that data.

As described in the use case, it is perfect for backup data storage where you do not expect to retrieve the data often. Think of it as a data dump; it is nice to know you have a backup, but it actually is expensive and somewhat difficult to retrieve everything.