Working with archived objects

To reduce your storage costs for infrequently accessed objects, you can archive those objects. When you archive an object, it is moved into low-cost storage, which means that you can't access it in real time.

Although archived objects are not accessible in real time, you can restore them in minutes or hours, depending on the storage class. You can restore an archived object by using the Amazon S3 console, S3 Batch Operations, the REST API, the AWS SDKs, and the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). For instructions, see Restoring an archived object.

Amazon S3 objects in the following storage classes or tiers are archived and are not accessible in real time:

To restore archived objects, you must do the following:

For more information about how all Amazon S3 storage classes compare, see Understanding and managing Amazon S3 storage classes. For more information about S3 Intelligent-Tiering, see How S3 Intelligent-Tiering works.

The time it takes a restore job to finish depends on which archive storage class or storage tier you use and which retrieval option you specify: Expedited (only available for S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access), Standard, or Bulk. For more information, see Understanding archive retrieval options.

You can be notified when your restore is complete by using Amazon S3 Event Notifications. For more information, see Amazon S3 Event Notifications.

Restoring objects from S3 Glacier

When you use S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval or S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Amazon S3 restores a temporary copy of the object only for the specified duration. After that, it deletes the restored object copy. You can modify the expiration period of a restored copy by reissuing a restore request. In this case, Amazon S3 updates the expiration period relative to the current time.

Amazon S3 calculates the expiration time of the restored object copy by adding the number of days specified in the restoration request to the time when the requested restoration is completed. Amazon S3 then rounds the resulting time to the next day at midnight Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). For example, suppose that a restored object copy was created on October 15, 2012, at 10:30 AM UTC, and the restoration period was specified as 3 days. In this case, the restored copy expires on October 19, 2012, at 00:00 UTC, at which time Amazon S3 deletes the object copy.

Restoring objects from S3 Intelligent-Tiering

When you restore an object from the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access tier or S3 Intelligent-Tiering Deep Archive Access tier, the object moves back into the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Frequent Access tier. If the object is not accessed after 30 consecutive days, it automatically moves into the Infrequent Access tier. After a minimum of 90 consecutive days of no access, the object moves into the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access tier. If the object is not accessed after a minimum of 180 consecutive days, the object moves into the Deep Archive Access tier.

Using S3 Batch Operations with restore requests

To restore more than one Amazon S3 object with a single request, you can use S3 Batch Operations. You provide S3 Batch Operations with a list of objects to operate on. S3 Batch Operations calls the respective API operation to perform the specified operation. A single Batch Operations job can perform the specified operation on billions of objects containing exabytes of data.