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).

This page is only for existing customers of the Amazon Glacier service using Vaults and the original REST API from 2012.

If you're looking for archival storage solutions, we recommend using the Amazon Glacier storage classes in Amazon S3, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. To learn more about these storage options, see Amazon Glacier storage classes.

Amazon Glacier (original standalone vault-based service) will no longer accept new customers starting December 15, 2025, with no impact to existing customers. Amazon Glacier is a standalone service with its own APIs that stores data in vaults and is distinct from Amazon S3 and the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes. Your existing data will remain secure and accessible in Amazon Glacier indefinitely. No migration is required. For low-cost, long-term archival storage, Amazon recommends the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes, which deliver a superior customer experience with S3 bucket-based APIs, full Amazon Web Services Region availability, lower costs, and Amazon service integration. If you want enhanced capabilities, consider migrating to Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes by using our Amazon Solutions Guidance for transferring data from Amazon Glacier vaults to Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes.

Supported Operations in Amazon Glacier

To work with vaults and archives (see Amazon Glacier Data Model), Amazon Glacier supports a set of operations. Among all the supported operations, only the following operations are asynchronous:

These operations require you to first initiate a job and then download the job output. The following sections summarize the Amazon Glacier operations.

Vault Operations

Amazon Glacier provides operations to create and delete vaults. You can obtain a vault description for a specific vault or for all vaults in an Amazon Web Services Region. The vault description provides information, such as the creation date, the number of archives in the vault, the total size in bytes used by all the archives in the vault, and the date that Amazon Glacier generated the vault inventory. Amazon Glacier also provides operations to set, retrieve, and delete a notification configuration on the vault. For more information, see Working with Vaults in Amazon Glacier.

Archive Operations

Amazon Glacier provides operations for you to upload and delete archives. You cannot update an existing archive; you must delete the existing archive and upload a new archive. Each time that you upload an archive, Amazon Glacier generates a new archive ID. For more information, see Working with Archives in Amazon Glacier.

Jobs

You can initiate an Amazon Glacier job to perform a retrieval on an archive or get an inventory of a vault.

The following are the types of Amazon Glacier jobs: