Getting Started with Amazon S3 Glacier - Amazon S3 Glacier
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

If you're new to archival storage in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), we recommend that you start by learning more about the S3 Glacier storage classes in Amazon S3, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. For more information, see S3 Glacier storage classes and Storage classes for archiving objects in the Amazon S3 User Guide.

Getting Started with Amazon S3 Glacier

You can get started with Amazon S3 Glacier (S3 Glacier) by working with vaults and archives. A vault is a container for storing archives, and an archive is any object, such as a photo, video, or document, that you store in a vault. An archive is the base unit of storage in S3 Glacier. This getting started exercise provides instructions for you to explore basic S3 Glacier operations on vaults and archives. For more information about these resources, see the Amazon S3 Glacier Data Model section.

In the getting started exercise, you will create a vault, upload and download an archive, and then delete the archive and the vault. You can do all these operations programmatically. However, the getting started exercise uses the S3 Glacier management console to create and delete a vault. For uploading and downloading an archive, this getting started section uses the high-level API for the Amazon SDK for Java and the Amazon SDK for .NET. The high-level API provides a simplified programming experience when working with S3 Glacier. For more information about using the high-level API with the Amazon SDKs, see Using the Amazon SDKs with Amazon S3 Glacier.

Important

S3 Glacier does provide a console. However, any archive operation, such as upload, download, or deletion, requires you to use the Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI) or write code. There is no console support for archive operations. For example, to upload data, such as photos, videos, and other documents, you must either use the Amazon CLI or write code to make requests, by using either the REST API directly or by using the Amazon SDKs.

To install the Amazon CLI, see Amazon Command Line Interface. For more information about using S3 Glacier with the Amazon CLI, see the Amazon CLI Reference for S3 Glacier. For examples of using the Amazon CLI to upload archives to S3 Glacier, see Using S3 Glacier with the Amazon Command Line Interface.

This getting started exercise provides code examples in Java and C# for you to upload and download an archive. The last section of the getting started exercise provides steps where you can learn more about the developer experience with S3 Glacier.

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