# Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive and 11 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Very cheap long-term storage at about $1 per TB per month for data you rarely read back. Retrieval is slow and expensive, the caveat critics agree on.

## Why people recommend it

- Very cheap per terabyte (8 comments): "For my use case (long term storage, rarely downloaded), Glacier Deep Archive is about $1/TB/mo which is cheaper than anything else out there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806602)) "The ~1 USD per TB per month of glacier deep archive is hard to compete with if you (probably) don't need to read the data back." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872115)) "Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814635))
- Good for rarely read data (3 comments): "For my use case (long term storage, rarely downloaded), Glacier Deep Archive is about $1/TB/mo which is cheaper than anything else out there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806602)) "The ~1 USD per TB per month of glacier deep archive is hard to compete with if you (probably) don't need to read the data back." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872115)) "Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814635))
- Offline and off-site storage (3 comments): "Your data is offline by default. It would be logistically infeasible for a rogue agent to physically mount every tape" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533760)) "Glacier offers redundancy which storage servers don't" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46818229)) "it's off-site, which is a resilience advantage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816742))

## What people warn about

- Slow and costly to retrieve (4 comments): "isn't the point of Glacier that it's really expensive and slow if you retrieve everything?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999517)) "It's a serious pain in the ass because it takes hours to queue up and retrieve a file." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764801)) "And then has to pay hundreds to get the data back" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679524))
- S3 is expensive overall (2 comments): "Even with Glacier, S3 is ridiculously expensive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770155)) "S3 is too expensive to do a restore from." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961233))
- Cheaper or faster rivals exist (2 comments): "I hit $30 with only 3 tb of data with deep archive while wasabi AND backblaze cost less than that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255509)) "Faster recovery time than Glacier Deep Archive, less cost over a period of years" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906621))
- Per-file overhead, unclear costs (2 comments): "Glacier, but that has a high overhead per file" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763739)) "it has different effective costs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49871970))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amazon S3](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-s3.md): 170 recommend
- [Cloudflare R2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-r2.md): 85 recommend
- [Backblaze B2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/backblaze-b2.md): 50 recommend
- [AWS S3](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-s3.md): 17 recommend
- [Wasabi object storage](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wasabi.md): 10 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/glacier/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-s3-glacier-deep-archive/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).