Amazon Glacier | Data Retrievals

Question 1

How do I set up Vault Lock?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 1

You can set up Vault Lock in the AWS Glacier console or use the Vault Lock APIs in the AWS SDK. To learn more, please read Getting Started with Amazon Glacier Vault Lock in the Amazon Glacier developer’s guide.

Question 2

How can I retrieve data from the service?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 2

When you make a request to retrieve data from Glacier, you initiate a retrieval job for an archive. Once the retrieval job completes, your data will be available to download or access it using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for 24 hours. There are three options for retrieving data with varying access times and cost: Expedited, Standard, and Bulk retrievals.

Question 3

What are Standard retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 3

Standard retrievals allow you to access any of your archives within several hours. Standard retrievals typically complete within 3 – 5 hours.

Question 4

How do I use Standard retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 4

To make a Standard retrieval, set the “Tier” parameter in the InitiateJob API request to “Standard”. If no tier is specified, the request will default to Standard.

Question 5

How much do Standard retrievals cost?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 5

Standard retrievals are priced at a flat rate of $0.01 per GB and $0.05 per 1,000 requests. For example, retrieving 500 archives that are 1 GB each would cost 500GB x $0.01 + 500 x $0.05/1,000 = $5.025

Question 6

When should I use Standard retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 6

Standard retrievals are a low-cost way to access your data within just a few hours. For example, you can use Standard retrievals to restore backup data, retrieve archived media content for same-day editing or distribution, or pull and analyze logs to drive business decisions within hours.

Question 7

What are Bulk retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 7

Bulk retrievals are Glacier’s lowest-cost retrieval option, enabling you to retrieve large amounts, even petabytes, of data inexpensively in a day. Bulk retrievals typically complete within 5 – 12 hours.

Question 8

How do I use Bulk retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 8

To make a Bulk retrieval, set the “Tier” parameter in the InitiateJob API request to Bulk.

Question 9

How much do Bulk retrievals cost?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 9

Bulk retrievals are priced at a flat rate of just $0.0025 per GB and $0.025 per request. For example, retrieving 500 archives that are 1 GB each would cost 500GB x $0.0025 + 500 x $0.025/1,000 = $1.2625.

Question 10

When should I use Bulk retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 10

Bulk retrievals are designed to enable customers to cost-effectively pull large amounts of data for non-urgent use cases such as transcoding petabytes of raw video content or analyzing large genomics sequences.

Question 11

What are Expedited retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 11

Expedited retrievals allow you to quickly access your data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required. For all but the largest archives (250MB+), data accessed using Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1 – 5 minutes. There are two types of Expedited retrievals: On-Demand and Provisioned. On-Demand requests are like EC2 On-Demand instances and are available the vast majority of the time. Provisioned requests are guaranteed to be available when you need them.

Question 12

What is a Provisioned capacity unit?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 12

Provisioned Capacity guarantees that your retrieval capacity for Expedited retrievals will be available when you need it. Each unit of capacity ensures that at least 3 expedited retrievals can be performed every 5 minutes and provides up to 150MB/s of retrieval throughput.

Question 13

When should I provision retrieval capacity?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 13

Retrieval capacity can be provisioned if you have specific Expedited retrieval rate requirements that need to be met. Without provisioned capacity, Expedited retrieval requests will be accepted if capacity is available at the time the request is made.

Question 14

How do I purchase provisioned capacity?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 14

You can purchase provisioned capacity using the console, SDK, or the CLI.

Question 15

How much does provisioned capacity cost?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 15

Each unit of provisioned capacity costs $100 per month from the date of purchase.

Question 16

How do I use Expedited retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 16

To make an Expedited retrieval, set the “Tier” parameter in the InitiateJob API request to Expedited. There is no need to designate whether an Expedited retrieval is On-Demand or Provisioned. If you have purchased provision capacity, then all Expedited retrievals will be automatically be served via your Provisioned capacity.

Question 17

How much do Expedited retrievals cost?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 17

Expedited retrievals are priced at a flat rate of $0.03 per GB and $0.01 per request. For example, retrieving 10 objects with a size of 1GB each, the cost would be 10 x $0.03 +10 x $0.01 = $0.40.

Question 18

When should I use Expedited retrievals?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 18

Expedited retrievals are optimized for the occasional urgent request for a small number of archives. For all but the largest archives (250MB+), data accessed using Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1 – 5 minutes. If your application or workload requires a guarantee that your Expedited retrievals will be available when you need it, then you should consider using Provisioned capacity.

Question 19

Can I retrieve part of an archive?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 19

Yes, range retrievals enable you to retrieve a specific range of an archive. Range retrievals are similar to regular retrievals in Amazon Glacier. Both require the initiation of a retrieval job (See How can I retrieve data? for more information). You can use range retrievals to reduce or eliminate your retrieval fees (See How much data can I retrieve for free?)

When initiating a retrieval job using range retrievals, you provide a byte range that can start at zero (which would be the beginning of your archive), or at any 1MB interval thereafter (e.g. 1MB, 2MB, 3MB, etc). The end of the range can either be the end of your archive or any 1MB interval greater than the beginning of your range.

Question 20

Why would I retrieve only a range of an archive?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 20

There are several reasons why you might choose to perform a range retrieval. For example, you may have aggregated several files and uploaded them as a single archive. You may then need to retrieve a small selection of those files, in which case you could retrieve only the ranges of the archive that contained the required files. Another reason you could choose to perform a range retrieval is to manage how much data you download from Amazon Glacier in a given period. When you make a request to retrieve data from Glacier, you initiate a retrieval job for an archive. Once the retrieval job completes, your data will be available to download or access using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for 24 hours. The data retrieved is then available for download for 24 hours. You could therefore retrieve an archive in parts in order to manage the schedule of your downloads.

Question 21

How do I view my jobs?

Data Retrievals

Amazon Glacier | Storage

Answer 21

You can list your ongoing jobs for any of your vaults by calling the ListJobs API. The list of jobs provides information including the job’s creation time and date and the job’s status (e.g. in-progress, completed successfully, or not in which case reasons for the job not succeeding are provided). The progress of a single job can be tracked by calling the DescribeJob API and providing the corresponding job ID. The status of the job will be returned immediately.