There are 4 types of S3 services:
- Amazon S3 Standard is the default class.
- Amazon S3 Standard Infrequent Access (IA) is designed for less frequently accessed data. Typical use cases are backup and disaster recovery solutions.
- Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access is designed for data that is not often needed but when required, needs to be accessed rapidly. Data is stored in one zone and if that zone is destroyed, all data is lost.
- Amazon Glacier is designed for long-term storage of data that is infrequently accessed and where retrieval latency of minutes or hours is acceptable.
| Glacier Overhead Cost | The cost of extra storage Amazon has to use in order to facilitate glacier functionality - if you’re storing lots of tiny things in glacier your overhead cost is going to be a big chunk of it (since the overhead for each object is a fixed size regardless of the object size). As of today, for each object archives to Glacier, 8KB is used for S3 metadata and 32KB is used for Glacier indexing/metadata (so 40KB overhead per object). |