Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive are secure, durable, and extremely low-cost Amazon S3 cloud storage classes for data archiving and long-term backup. They are designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability and provide comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that can help meet even the most stringent regulatory requirements. Customers can store data for as little as $1 per terabyte per month, significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon S3 Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides two access options ranging from 12 to 48 hours.

An S3 Lifecycle configuration is a set of rules that define actions that Amazon S3 applies to a group of objects.

There are two types of actions as shown below.

– Transition actions: This defines when objects transition to another storage class. For example, you might choose to transition objects to the S3 Standard-IA storage class 30 days after you created them, or archive objects to the S3 Glacier storage class one year after creating them. There are costs associated with the lifecycle transition requests. For pricing information, see Amazon S3 pricing.
– Expiration actions: Define when objects expire. Amazon S3 deletes expired objects on your behalf. The lifecycle expiration costs depend on when you choose to expire objects. For more information, see Understanding object expiration.

Simply put, in an S3 Lifecycle configuration, you can define rules to transition objects from one storage class to another to save on storage costs.

Note: Even when you create a Zero (0) days lifecycle rule to move the entire bucket to Glacier, the objects will see appear in s3.

Explanation
– Note: If you use S3 for transitioning data to Glacier, you will not see data in Glacier service, the objects continue to reside in S3, but are stored using GLACIER storage class. You can look at the storage class of the object to confirm this.

Recommended (Solution)
– If you wish to have this separation, we can manually download the s3 bucket, zip it and upload it to Glacia Vault. In this way, we can have the bucket (folders) uploaded to Glacier Vault and deleted from S3.

Note: In this case, if we wish to recover any object, we would download and search for the object.