What's the Difference Between Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier?
Compare Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon S3
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Amazon S3 Glacier
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Category
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Storage, Object Storage |
Storage, Archive |
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Description
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Virtually unlimited secure object storage for AI, analytics, and archives |
Low-cost cloud storage for data archiving and long-term backup with retrieval options from minutes to hours. |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per GB stored + requests + data transfer |
From $0.0036/GB/month |
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Free tier
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Yes |
No |
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Expert take
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“S3 delivers eleven 9s of durability and scales without limits. It serves as the foundation for data lakes, backup pipelines, and ML training data because you can store anything at any scale and access it from anywhere with fine-grained permissions.” |
“Glacier is for data you need to keep but rarely access. Deep Archive at $0.00099/GB/month is the lowest storage cost in the cloud. Pair it with S3 Lifecycle rules to automatically transition objects from Standard to Glacier after a set period.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon S3 or Amazon S3 Glacier
Use Amazon S3 when:
- Data lakes
- Backup & restore
- Static website hosting
- Archive
- Big data analytics
Use Amazon S3 Glacier when:
- Data archiving
- Compliance archives
- Media asset preservation
- Long-term backup
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