The most suitable AWS service for long-term cloud backup is AWS Simple Storage Service (S3).
The service offers a number of different cloud storage classes suitable for long-term storage, with different retrieval times and different pricing:
| S3 Storage Class Name | Description | Price per Month |
|---|---|---|
| S3 Intelligent Tiering | For long-term backups with unknown access patterns – the storage class automatically moves the data into the most cost-effective classes (Frequent, Infrequent, Archive Instant Access tiers) | $23.55/TB |
| S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | The lowest-cost aws storage for long-lived rarely accessed data which need to be retrieved in milliseconds | $4.1/TB |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | Suitable for data accessed 1-2 years and retrieved within minutes to hours (configurable) | $3.69/TB |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | The lowest-cost storage class with retrieval time within 12 hours. | $1.01/TB |
All above cloud backup storage classes are designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple Availability Zones and are thus resilient to events impacting an entire availability zone.
Finally, for any long-term AWS backup we strongly recommend:
- Storing only compressed
- Storing only encrypted files: AWS offers a number of encryption options for S3 – unless there is a need for encryption audit, we recommend using S3 default server-side encryption.
- Storing only non-duplicate files which are valuable