QuantaShare FAQs

Versioning

Q: What is Versioning?

Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.

Q: Why should I use Versioning?

Amazon S3 provides customers with a highly durable storage infrastructure. Versioning offers an additional level of protection by providing a means of recovery when customers accidentally overwrite or delete objects. This allows you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving.

Q: How do I start using Versioning?

You can start using Versioning by enabling a setting on your Amazon S3 bucket. For more information on how to enable Versioning, please refer to the Amazon S3 Technical Documentation.

Q: How does Versioning protect me from accidental deletion of my objects?

When a user performs a DELETE operation on an object, subsequent default requests will no longer retrieve the object. However, all versions of that object will continue to be preserved in your Amazon S3 bucket and can be retrieved or restored. Only the owner of an Amazon S3 bucket can permanently delete a version.

Amazon S3 Storage Classes

What are the Amazon S3 storage classes?

Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes based on the data access, resiliency, and cost requirements of your workloads. Each S3 storage class charges a fee to store data and fees to access data. Choosing the appropriate class depends on access patterns and retention times to optimize costs.

How do I decide which S3 storage class to use?

Most workloads have changing or unpredictable access patterns, If you know your data’s access patterns, S3 Standard is ideal for frequently accessed data, while S3 Standard-Infrequent Access is suitable for data accessed once every few months. Archive storage options like S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive are optimal for rarely accessed data.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering

What is S3 Intelligent-Tiering?

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is a storage class for data with unknown or changing access patterns. It automatically moves objects between access tiers to optimize storage costs based on access patterns. There are no retrieval fees, and it offers archive access tiers for rarely accessed data.

Why would I choose to use S3 Intelligent-Tiering?

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is ideal for datasets where access patterns are unpredictable. It automatically moves infrequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers and returns data to higher-cost tiers when access resumes, optimizing storage costs over time.

How durable and available is S3 Intelligent-Tiering?

S3 Intelligent-Tiering offers 99.999999999% durability, the same as S3 Standard. It is designed for 99.9% availability and includes a service level agreement for service credits if availability falls below expectations in any billing cycle.

S3 Standard-Infrequent Access

Q: What is S3 Standard - Infrequent Access?

Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA) is an Amazon S3 storage class for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. Standard - IA offers the high durability, throughput, and low latency of Amazon S3 Standard, with a low per GB storage price and per GB retrieval fee. This combination of low cost and high performance make Standard - IA ideal for long-term storage, backups, and as a data store for disaster recovery. The Standard - IA storage class is set at the object level and can exist in the same bucket as Standard, allowing you to use lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Q: Why would I choose to use Standard - IA?

Standard - IA is ideal for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. Standard - IA is ideally suited for long-term file storage, older data from sync and share, backup data, and disaster recovery files.

Q: What performance does S3 Standard - Infrequent Access offer?

S3 Standard - Infrequent Access provide the same performance as S3 Standard storage.

S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access

Q: What is the S3 One Zone-IA storage class?

The S3 One Zone-IA storage class is an Amazon S3 storage class where customers can choose to store objects in a single Availability Zone. S3 One Zone-IA redundantly stores data within that single Availability Zone, offering storage at 20% less cost than the geographically redundant S3 Standard-IA storage, which stores data across multiple geographically separate Availability Zones.

S3 One Zone-IA offers a 99% availability SLA and is designed for eleven 9’s (99.999999999%) of durability within the Availability Zone. However, unlike S3 Standard storage classes, S3 One Zone-IA is not resilient to the physical loss of the Availability Zone due to major events like earthquakes or floods.

S3 One Zone-IA storage offers the same Amazon S3 features as S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA, and is used through the Amazon S3 API, CLI, and console. The S3 One Zone-IA storage class is set at the object level and can coexist in the same bucket as S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes. You can use S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Q: What use cases best suit the S3 One Zone-IA storage class?

S3 One Zone-IA is ideal for infrequently accessed storage such as backup copies, disaster recovery copies, or other easily recreatable data.

Q: What performance does S3 One Zone-IA storage offer?

The S3 One Zone-IA storage class offers similar performance to S3 Standard and S3 Standard-Infrequent Access storage.

Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class

Q: What is the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class?

The S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class delivers low-cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval, such as medical images or news media assets. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers fast access to archive storage, with the same throughput and milliseconds access as the S3 Standard storage classes. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9s) of data durability and 99.9% availability by redundantly storing data across a minimum of three physically separated Amazon Web Services Availability Zones.

Q: Why would I choose to use S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval?

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is ideal if you have data that is rarely accessed (once a quarter, on average) and requires milliseconds retrieval times. It’s purpose built storage for data that needs the same low latency and high throughput performance of S3 Standard-IA, but your data is accessed less frequently than S3 Standard-IA, with a lower storage price and slightly higher fees to access data.

Q: How available and durable is S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval?

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9s) of durability and 99.9% availability, the same as S3 Standard-IA, and carries a service level agreement providing service credits if availability is less than 99% in any billing cycle.

Q: What performance can I expect from S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval?

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval provides the same milliseconds latency and high throughput performance as the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes. Unlike the S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage classes which are designed for asynchronous access, you do not need to issue a Restore request before accessing an object stored in S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval.

Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (Formerly Amazon S3 Glacier storage class)

Q: What is the S3 Glacier storage class?

The S3 Glacier storage class is secure, durable, and low-cost storage for data archiving. You can reliably store any amount of data at costs that are competitive with or cheaper than on-premises solutions. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying needs, the S3 Glacier storage class provides three retrieval options that range from a few minutes to several hours. You can upload objects directly to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, or use S3 Lifecycle policies to transfer data from any of the Amazon S3 storage classes for active data (S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval) to the S3 Glacier storage class.

Q: How can I restore my objects that are archived in S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval?

To restore objects archived in S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, follow these steps:

1. Select the bucket where the archived object is stored.

2. Locate and select the file with the storage class set to S3 Glacier.

3. Click on the More icon (three dots) next to the file.

4. Choose the Initiate restore option from the dropdown menu.

5. In the input box, type the number of days you want to restore the object for.

6. Click on the Restore button to start the process.

This will initiate the restoration of your object, making it temporarily accessible from the S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval storage class.

Q: How long will it take to restore my objects archived in Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval?

When processing a restore job, Amazon S3 first retrieves the requested data from Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (which typically takes 3-5 hours), and then creates a temporary copy of the requested data in S3 Standard (which typically takes on the order of a few minutes). You can expect most restore jobs initiated via the Amazon S3 APIs or Management Console to complete in 3-5 hours.

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Q: What is Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive?

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is a new Amazon S3 storage class that provides secure and durable object storage for long-term retention of data that is accessed once or twice a year. From just ¥ 0.012 per GB-month, Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices significantly lower than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data off-site.

Q: What use cases are best suited for Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive?

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is an ideal storage class to provide offline protection of your company’s most important data assets, or when long-term data retention is required for corporate policy, contractual, or regulatory compliance requirements. Customers find Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive to be a compelling choice to protect core intellectual property, financial and medical records, research results, legal documents, seismic exploration studies, and long-term backups, especially in highly regulated industries, such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and Public Sectors. In addition, there are organizations, such as media and entertainment companies, that want to keep a backup copy of core intellectual property. Frequently, customers using Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive are able to reduce or discontinue the use of on-premises magnetic tape libraries and off-premises tape archival services.

Q: How does Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive differ from Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval?

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive expands our data archiving offerings, enabling you to select the optimal storage class based on storage and retrieval costs, and retrieval times. Choose Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval when you want retrieval options in as little as 1-5 minutes using Expedited retrievals for archived data. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, in contrast, is designed for colder data that is very unlikely to be accessed, but still requires long-term, durable storage. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is up to 75% less expensive than Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and provides retrieval within 12 hours using the Standard retrieval speed. You may also reduce retrieval costs by selecting Bulk retrieval, which will return data within 48 hours.