Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Ranked 5 of 10 object storage by recommenders
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.
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.
27 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- criticize it
- 11
- approval share
- 59%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Very cheap per terabyte
“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”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Backblaze has stopped backing up your data” “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.”
Comment from 28 Sep 2026 in “S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past” “Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?” - Comment from 6 Oct 2026 in “Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort”
- Comment from 1 Aug 2026 in “Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified”
- Comment from 6 Sep 2026 in “Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone”
- Comment from 28 Sep 2026 in “S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past”
- Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”
Good for rarely read data
“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”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Backblaze has stopped backing up your data” “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.”
Comment from 28 Sep 2026 in “S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past” “Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?” Offline and off-site storage
“Your data is offline by default. It would be logistically infeasible for a rogue agent to physically mount every tape”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Physically Immutable Optical Archive Libraries” “Glacier offers redundancy which storage servers don't”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?” “it's off-site, which is a resilience advantage”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow and costly to retrieve
“isn't the point of Glacier that it's really expensive and slow if you retrieve everything?”
Comment from 13 Feb 2026 in “My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood” “It's a serious pain in the ass because it takes hours to queue up and retrieve a file.”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “Backblaze has stopped backing up your data” “And then has to pay hundreds to get the data back”
Comment from 7 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead” - Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage”
S3 is expensive overall
“Even with Glacier, S3 is ridiculously expensive”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “Backblaze has stopped backing up your data” “S3 is too expensive to do a restore from.”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “The Tao of Backup” Cheaper or faster rivals exist
“I hit $30 with only 3 tb of data with deep archive while wasabi AND backblaze cost less than that.”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help” “Faster recovery time than Glacier Deep Archive, less cost over a period of years”
Comment from 30 Sep 2026 in “Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026” Per-file overhead, unclear costs
“Glacier, but that has a high overhead per file”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “Backblaze has stopped backing up your data” “it has different effective costs”
Comment from 27 Sep 2026 in “S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past”
Other object storage people recommend
The four most recommended other object storage, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | 170 | 84 | 67% | 12 | 14 yrs3 owners | Approved |
| Cloudflare R2 | 85 | 14 | 86% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Backblaze B2 | 50 | 14 | 78% | 12 | — | Approved |
| AWS S3 | 17 | 7 | 71% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Deep ArchiveThis page | 16 | 11 | 59% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
All 29 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I still find AWS S3 glacier deep archive to be cheap enough”
“S3 is too expensive to do a restore from.”
“Glacier was new, so I chalk it up to it being a new product, not anything greedy or malicious.”
“Faster recovery time than Glacier Deep Archive, less cost over a period of years”
“perhaps the only cost-effective service in all of AWS”
“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.”
“it has different effective costs”
“You could store all of it in S3 deep archive for $200/m”
“reading from Glacier is expensive”
“most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that”
“Your data is offline by default. It would be logistically infeasible for a rogue agent to physically mount every tape”
“It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures.”
“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”
“S3's cheapest tape-based long term storage tier”
“Even with Glacier, S3 is ridiculously expensive”
“It's a serious pain in the ass because it takes hours to queue up and retrieve a file.”
“Glacier, but that has a high overhead per file”
“And then has to pay hundreds to get the data back”
“storing that 100 TB in AWS Glacier Deep Archive would run you slightly over $100/mo”
“isn't the point of Glacier that it's really expensive and slow if you retrieve everything?”
“Glacier offers redundancy which storage servers don't”
“Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap”
“marketed as robotic tape drive loaders, where in reality it is mostly just regular old S3”
“really revealed amazon's strategy, which is lock your data away and charge you to access it”
“I hit $30 with only 3 tb of data with deep archive while wasabi AND backblaze cost less than that.”
“It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.”
“either a glacier-style s3 service (aws or backblaze/etc)”
“AWS is crazy expensive for storage, especially down in the TB range”
“it's off-site, which is a resilience advantage”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.