Expiry date for Glacier backups

Question

Is there a way to set an expiry date in Amazon Glacier? I want to copy in weekly backup files, but I dont want to hang on to more than 1 years worth.

Can the files be set to "expire" after one year, or is this something I will have to do manually?

Answer 1

While not available natively within Amazon Glacier, AWS has recently enabled Archiving Amazon S3 Data to Amazon Glacier, which makes working with Glacier much easier in the first place already:

[...] Amazon S3 was designed for rapid retrieval. Glacier, in contrast, trades off retrieval time for cost, providing storage for as little at $0.01 per Gigabyte per month while retrieving data within three to five hours.

How would you like to have the best of both worlds? How about rapid retrieval of fresh data stored in S3, with automatic, policy-driven archiving to lower cost Glacier storage as your data ages, along with easy, API-driven or console-powered retrieval? [emphasis mine]

[...] You can now use Amazon Glacier as a storage option for Amazon S3.

This is enabled by facilitating Amazon S3 Object Lifecycle Management, which not only drives the mentioned Object Archival (Transition Objects to the Glacier Storage Class) but also includes optional Object Expiration, which allows you to achieve what you want as outlined in section Before You Decide to Expire Objects within Lifecycle Configuration Rules:

• The Expiration action deletes objects
  You might have objects in Amazon S3 or archived to Amazon Glacier. No matter where these objects are, Amazon S3 will delete them. You will no longer be able to access these objects. [emphasis mine]

So at the small price of having your objects stored in S3 for a short time (which actually eases working with Glacier a lot due to removing the need to manage archives/inventories) you gain the benefit of optional automatic expiration.