Amazon debuts cheap archival and backup cloud storage with Glacier

Amazon Web Services has introduced Amazon Glacier, inexpensive slow-moving storage for files that don’t need to be accessed very often.

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Unlike Amazon S3, Glacier is meant for data like backups and archives, the sort of things you need to keep for compliance but don’t access much. This kind of storage could definitely make sense for startups and enterprise businesses focusing on health care, finance, media, and more.

“With Glacier, your retrieval requests are queued up and honored at a somewhat leisurely pace,” Jeff Barr, Amazon Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions, wrote in a blog post. “Your archive will be available for downloading in 3 to 5 hours.”

Glacier pricing will start at just $.01 per GB per month. Barr writes:

Glacier provides – at a cost as low as $0.01 per Gigabyte, per month – extremely low-cost archive storage. You can store a little bit, or you can store a lot (Terabytes, Petabytes, and beyond). There’s no upfront fee and you pay only for the storage that you use. You don’t have to worry about capacity planning and you will never run out of storage space. Glacier removes the problems associated with under or over-provisioning archival storage, maintaining geographically distinct facilities and verifying hardware or data integrity, irrespective of the length of your retention periods.

Glacier photo via Shutterstock