With an Amazon S3 Glacier you can have secure, durable, and low-cost Amazon S3 storage for any of your data archiving and a long-term backup plan. This service gives customers an avenue to store their data for months, years, or decades at a very reduced cost. With S3 Glacier you can offload the burdens of operating and scaling the storage to AWS, you don’t have to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, and many more as it is fully managed by AWS. S3 Glacier is one of the different storage classes under Amazon S3. If you want to read more on Amazon S3 you can check on these related topics Hosting Static Website and Versioning on AWS S3 and How to deploy an Angular App to AWS S3. FastGlacier is a freeware Windows Client for Amazon S3 Glacier which allows you to upload files to Amazon Glacier using full bandwidth you can also use it to download files from Amazon Glacier and manage your vault easily.
Please note that before you can start setting up your Amazon S3 Glacier, you must sign up for an AWS account and be an admin user. In this guide, we already created an AWS account with an admin user. But if you want to know how to set up an AWS account with IAM you can check this Creating IAM Users, Adding MFA and Policies on AWS
Now let’s create a vault
You can sign into your account and using the AWS Management Console open the S3 Glacier console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/glacier/.
If this is your first time using S3 Glacier, click Get started or Create Vault.
Go ahead and select an AWS Region from the Region selector. In this guide, we will be using EU (Paris) Region. Enter the vault name in the Vault Name field and then click Next Step.
You can choose to activate the Amazon Simple Notifications Service (SNS) to have notifications sent to you or your application whenever certain S3 Glacier jobs are complete. For this guide, we will not configure notifications for the vault. Select Do not enable notifications.
Make sure the AWS Region and vault name are correct, then click Submit.
Your new vault will be displayed on the S3 Glacier Vaults page.
You can set a Vault access policy to be able to manage permissions on your vault account.
You can create a Vault lock policy to enforce compliance controls and automate actions on your vault account.
When setting permissions to your IAM user you can either Add a user to a group, Copy permissions from an existing user or Attach existing policies directly. But in this guide, we will be using the latter with the policy name AmazonGlacierFullAccess
Install FastGlacier and launch the application and create a new account. In the IAM user section copy the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key and insert it into FastGlacier. Click Add new account.
You will need to locate your Region and confirm that your Vault is showing. You can Upload, Download, Delete and create New Folder for your Vault.
- When you click on the Upload button you can either select Upload file(s) or Upload Folder to move your files to Amazon Glacier.
You can also delete your Vault via FastGlacier
I hope you found this blog post on Setting Up your Amazon S3 Glacier and FastGlacier for Your Online Vault very interesting and helpful. In case you have any questions do not hesitate to ask in the comment section.