Network Programming in .NET

Amazon Glacier is a great place to store data cheaply that you have no urgent requirement to recover quickly. This could be data that you need to store for “safe keeping”, or backups-of-backups. It’s not a replacement for S3, since you can’t retrieve the data quickly.

The CLI examples on the Amazon site are quite complex, since they recommend you break the data into 1MB chunks before uploading. This approach is simpler, but will only work for files up to 4GB.

First, you’ll need to install the AWS CLI and run AWS configure, and enter your IAM access key, secret, and region (i.e. eu-west-1).

You can create a vault via the AWS web interface, this just confirms that you have access to them via the CLI;

aws glacier list-vaults –account-id –

Which returns;

{
“VaultList”: [
{
“VaultARN”: “arn:aws:glacier:eu-west-1:xxxx:vaults/AI-String
-xxxx”,
“VaultName”: “AI-String-xxx”,
“CreationDate”: “2019-08-20T14:19:59.345Z”,
“NumberOfArchives”: 0,
“SizeInBytes”: 0
},
{
“VaultARN”: “arn:aws:glacier:eu-west-1:xxxxxx:vaults/xxxxx
-www-backup”,
“VaultName”: “xxxxx-www-backup”,
“CreationDate”: “2017-08-27T14:45:10.021Z”,
“LastInventoryDate”: “2017-08-28T09:09:29.270Z”,
“NumberOfArchives”: 3,
“SizeInBytes”: 8880671766
}
]
}

Now, you can upload a file as follows;

aws glacier upload-archive –vault-name AI-String-Processing –accou
nt-id – –archive-description “AI String xxxx” –body AI-String-xxxx
.zip

Which returns

{
“location”: “/xxxxx/vaults/AI-String-xxxx/archives/….”,
“checksum”: “…..f”,
“archiveId”: “…Q”
}

Now, if you wait about 4 hours, you should see the archive counter increase in the AWS Web User interface.