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 S3 Glacier service using Vaults and the original REST API from 2012.

If you're looking for archival storage solutions we suggest using the S3 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 S3 Glacier storage classes and Long-term data storage using S3 Glacier storage classes in the Amazon S3 User Guide. These storage classes use the Amazon S3 API, are available in all regions, and can be managed within the Amazon S3 console. They offer features like Storage Cost Analysis, Storage Lens, security features including multiple encryption options, and more.

Supported Operations in S3 Glacier

To work with vaults and archives (see Amazon S3 Glacier Data Model), Amazon S3 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 S3 Glacier operations.

Vault Operations

S3 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 S3 Glacier generated the vault inventory. S3 Glacier also provides operations to set, retrieve, and delete a notification configuration on the vault. For more information, see Working with Vaults in Amazon S3 Glacier.

Archive Operations

S3 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, S3 Glacier generates a new archive ID. For more information, see Working with Archives in Amazon S3 Glacier.

Jobs

You can initiate an S3 Glacier job to perform a retrieval on an archive or get an inventory of a vault.

The following are the types of S3 Glacier jobs: