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Amazon Glacier

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Amazon Glacier vs Amazon S3: What are the differences?

Amazon Glacier: Low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions; Amazon S3: Store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3 are primarily classified as "Data Backup" and "Cloud Storage" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Amazon Glacier are:

  • Low cost – Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month.
  • You store data in Amazon Glacier as archives. An archive can represent a single file or you may choose to combine several files to be uploaded as a single archive. Retrieving archives from Amazon Glacier requires the initiation of a job. Jobs typically complete in 3 to 5 hours. You organize your archives in vaults.
  • Secure – Amazon Glacier supports secure transfer of your data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.

On the other hand, Amazon S3 provides the following key features:

  • Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
  • Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
  • A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), South America (Sao Paulo), and GovCloud (US) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

"Cold Storage" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon Glacier over the competitors, whereas "Reliable" was stated as the key factor in picking Amazon S3.

According to the StackShare community, Amazon S3 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3235 company stacks & 1615 developers stacks; compared to Amazon Glacier, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.

Decisions about Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3
Gabriel Pa

We offer our customer HIPAA compliant storage. After analyzing the market, we decided to go with Google Storage. The Nodejs API is ok, still not ES6 and can be very confusing to use. For each new customer, we created a different bucket so they can have individual data and not have to worry about data loss. After 1000+ customers we started seeing many problems with the creation of new buckets, with saving or retrieving a new file. Many false positive: the Promise returned ok, but in reality, it failed.

That's why we switched to S3 that just works.

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Pros of Amazon Glacier
Pros of Amazon S3
  • 6
    Cold Storage
  • 3
    Easy Setup
  • 1
    Cheap
  • 592
    Reliable
  • 493
    Scalable
  • 458
    Cheap
  • 329
    Simple & easy
  • 83
    Many sdks
  • 30
    Logical
  • 13
    Easy Setup
  • 11
    1000+ POPs
  • 11
    REST API
  • 6
    Secure
  • 4
    Easy
  • 4
    Plug and play
  • 3
    Web UI for uploading files
  • 2
    Flexible
  • 2
    Faster on response
  • 2
    GDPR ready
  • 1
    Easy integration with CloudFront
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Plug-gable

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Cons of Amazon Glacier
Cons of Amazon S3
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 7
      Permissions take some time to get right
    • 6
      Takes time/work to organize buckets & folders properly
    • 5
      Requires a credit card
    • 3
      Complex to set up

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Amazon Glacier?

    In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

    What is Amazon S3?

    Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Amazon Glacier?
    What companies use Amazon S3?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon Glacier or Amazon S3.
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    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Amazon Glacier?
    What tools integrate with Amazon S3?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3?
    Google Drive
    Keep photos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos, and more. Your first 15 GB of storage are free with a Google Account. Your files in Drive can be reached from any smartphone, tablet, or computer.
    Google Cloud Storage
    Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storing and retrieval of any amount of data and at any time. It provides a simple programming interface which enables developers to take advantage of Google's own reliable and fast networking infrastructure to perform data operations in a secure and cost effective manner. If expansion needs arise, developers can benefit from the scalability provided by Google's infrastructure.
    CrashPlan
    It runs continually in the background of a device, providing constant backup of new files. Any time a new file is created or an existing file is changed, the product adds the file to a "to do" list.
    Dropbox
    Harness the power of Dropbox. Connect to an account, upload, download, search, and more.
    restic
    It is a backup program that is fast, efficient and secure. It uses cryptography to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of your data.
    See all alternatives