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Amzon S3 storage has been around for some time. S3 storage is a great way to cut down on your hosting / storage costs by off loading large scripts / images / backup files directly to it.
Recently I’ve been using S3 storage for daily backup’s of all our servers which has worked extremely well.
Even though it’s an extremely low cost storage solution the Gigabytes soon start to pile up and with it the invoice from Amazon (I still wonder how they actually make any money off these services). For example if your backing up 2gb of data on a daily basis it soon adds up.
Recently Amazon brought out a brand new product called Amazon Glacier, which is designed for achieving data. To make it even better they allow you to set rules from your S3 buckets that automatically archive your files to it’s much cheaper (1c per GB) Glacier service after a certain number of days.
What’s the downsides of using Amazon Glacier? It can take 3-5 hours if you want to restore a file from Glacier. But this isn’t really an issue unless you have to go waaay back in time to dig up some old file that was erased by accident and only realized a few months after the fact.
How to backup to Amazon Glacier:
You can easily configure rules to archive your Amazon S3 objects to the new Amazon Glacier storage option by opening the Amazon S3 Management Console and following these simple steps:
- Select the Amazon S3 bucket containing the objects that you wish to archive to Amazon Glacier.
- Click on “Properties. Under the “Lifecycle” tab, click “Add rule.”
- Enter an object prefix in the “Object prefix:” input box. This rule is now applicable to all objects with names that start with the specified prefix.
- Choose whether you want to archive your objects based on the age of a given object or based on a specified date. Click the “Add Transition” button and specify the age or date value. Click the “Save” button.
Happy archiving!