Learning about archiving solutions with Amazon S3 Glacier

Earlier in this chapter, we introduced you to the Amazon S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive storage classes. Amazon Glacier offers long-term storage at very a low cost and is intended to be used for archival storage. The architecture offers the same 99.999999999% (eleven 9s) of durability so that in the event of a major disaster, you can rest assured that your old archives will be available to recover if the need arises. The technology works differently from standard S3 storage. The archives need to be requested before you can access/download them, which involves a two-step process of first creating a retrieval job and then downloading your data once the job is complete.

This retrieval process can take some time and depends on your chosen retrieval options, as previously discussed. However, the upside to this delay in being able to access your data is that you get some of the cheapest storage options on the Amazon platform...