Working with delete markers

A delete marker in Amazon S3 is a placeholder (or marker) for a versioned object that was specified in a simple DELETE request. A simple DELETE request is a request that doesn't specify a version ID. Because the object is in a versioning-enabled bucket, the object is not deleted. But the delete marker makes Amazon S3 behave as if the object is deleted. You can use an Amazon S3 API DELETE call on a delete marker. To do this, you must make the DELETE request by using an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user or role with the appropriate permissions.

A delete marker has a key name (or key) and version ID like any other object. However, a delete marker differs from other objects in the following ways:

Delete markers accrue a minimal charge for storage in Amazon S3. The storage size of a delete marker is equal to the size of the key name of the delete marker. A key name is a sequence of Unicode characters. The UTF-8 encoding for the key name adds 1‐4 bytes of storage to your bucket for each character in the name. Delete markers are stored in the S3 Standard storage class.

If you want to find out how many delete markers you have and what storage class they're stored in, you can use Amazon S3 Storage Lens. For more information, see Assessing your storage activity and usage with Amazon S3 Storage Lens and Amazon S3 Storage Lens metrics glossary.

For more information about key names, see Naming Amazon S3 objects. For information about deleting a delete marker, see Managing delete markers.

Only Amazon S3 can create a delete marker, and it does so whenever you send a DeleteObject request on an object in a versioning-enabled or suspended bucket. The object specified in the DELETE request is not actually deleted. Instead, the delete marker becomes the current version of the object. The object's key name (or key) becomes the key of the delete marker.

When you get an object without specifying a versionId in your request, if its current version is a delete marker, Amazon S3 responds with the following:

When you get an object by specifying a versionId in your request, if the specified version is a delete marker, Amazon S3 responds with the following:

The x-amz-delete-marker: true response header tells you that the object accessed was a delete marker. This response header never returns false, because when the value is false, the current or specified version of the object is not a delete marker.

The Last-Modified response header provides the creation time of the delete markers.

The following figure shows how a GetObject API call on an object whose current version is a delete marker responds with a 404 (Not Found) error and the response header includes x-amz-delete-marker: true.

If you make a GetObject call on an object by specifying a versionId in your request, and if the specified version is a delete marker, Amazon S3 responds with a 405 (Method Not Allowed) error and the response headers include x-amz-delete-marker: true and Last-Modified: timestamp.

The only way to list delete markers (and other versions of an object) is by using the versions subresource in a ListObjectVersions request. The following figure shows that a ListObjectsV2 or ListObjects request doesn't return objects whose current version is a delete marker.