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I am trying to reduce costs of my AWS system. I thought of moving some volumes I rarely use to Amazon Glacier, but I don't find any way I can do it inside AWS besides downloading the volume and uploading to Glacier, which sounds terrible.

I am wondering, is it possible to do this automatically? Assign some EC2 volumes to glacier directly from the EC2 console?

Thanks

JordanBelf
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    If you are concerned about cost, keep them as magnetic volumes. If you don't mind the extra work getting them back up and running again, just store them as snapshots. Glacier made more sense in the past, but now its not much cheaper than S3 storage. Only makes sense with massive volumes of data. – datasage Jul 06 '15 at 03:01
  • thanks a lot. Yes cost was my main reason to move to Glacier. I will investigate your suggestion of storing them as snapshots. Thanks a lot for the tip @datasage – JordanBelf Jul 06 '15 at 15:27

1 Answers1

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EBS volumes cannot be copied or migrated to Amazon Glacier.

EBS snapshots, even though they are stored in Amazon S3, also cannot be moved to Amazon Glacier.

There are 2 ways to put data into Amazon Glacier:

  1. Put the file/data directly into an Amazon Glacier vault.
  2. Put the file/data in Amazon S3, then use an Amazon S3 lifecycle to move the object(s) to Amazon Glacier.

You could use aws s3 sync to copy your filesystem into S3, then have that moved to Glacier. But there is no magic solution for what you want to achieve.

Matt Houser
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    2019 and still true. f'in aws. – Eric Twilegar Apr 16 '19 at 22:12
  • Would it be possible to instead copy the files directly to Amazon Glacier instead of the whole `EBS` volume? Instead of using the above `aws s3 sync` to copy to s3 and then to Glacier. – ConstantFun Jan 24 '20 at 08:39
  • @ConstantFun Yes, I say that in my answer: "Put the file/data directly into an Amazon Glacier vault" – Matt Houser Jan 24 '20 at 12:37
  • @MattHouser In the answer I am not sure if you are referring to the direct moves start point as a local environment or an EBS volume. Sorry for the confusion. – ConstantFun Jan 28 '20 at 07:40
  • @ConstantFun If you want to put the files from your EBS volume into Glacier, then you would execute the AWS CLI on the EC2 instance to do so. – Matt Houser Jan 28 '20 at 12:16