# Amazon S3 Glacier Vault

> S3 Glacier vaults store archives at deep per-GB-month discounts, with the real charges on the way out: retrieval fees per GB, expedited-tier premiums, and early-deletion fees for archives held under 90 days. ZopNight discovers vaults on the 6-hour cycle, tracks storage cost, and flags legacy or duplicate archives.

Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/aws/glacier-vault
Updated: 2026-08-19

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An S3 Glacier vault stores archival data at very low per-GB rates with retrieval fees. Vaults are cheap per GB but easy to forget entirely, and legacy vaults often duplicate data already covered by S3 lifecycle tiers.

## Cheap to keep, priced to leave

Vault storage bills per GB-month at rates far below S3 Standard. That is the whole pitch. The compensating meters sit on the exits: retrievals bill per GB plus per request, with the expedited tier priced well above standard and bulk retrieval cheapest and slowest; deleting an archive within 90 days of upload incurs a pro-rated early-deletion charge; and restoring data out to another service adds data transfer. The economics reward exactly one behaviour (write rarely, hold long, retrieve almost never) and punish any workflow that treats a vault like active storage.

## Archival estates in ZopNight's inventory

Vaults are discovered automatically on the 6-hour cycle, with storage cost from Cost Explorer or CUR 2.0 and hygiene recommendations for legacy or duplicate archives. The duplication finding is the interesting one: vault-based Glacier predates S3's own Glacier storage classes, and many estates now run both: lifecycle policies tiering S3 objects into Glacier classes while an old vault holds an earlier generation of the same backups. The vault's monthly charge then buys a redundant copy of data the S3 lifecycle already archives more manageably.

## Forgotten-archive economics

Vault waste is small, flat, and immortal: backup jobs from decommissioned systems that wrote nightly archives for years; compliance retention that expired without anyone deleting the underlying data; and vaults whose inventory nobody can describe, kept because retrieving the inventory to check feels like effort. At vault rates none of this is urgent, which is precisely why it persists for a decade.

## Taking a vault census

The S3 Glacier console lists vaults per region with archive counts and total size; vault inventories (requested asynchronously) enumerate contents. The practical audit pairs each vault with a named owner and retention reason. Vaults that fail to find either are deletion candidates, mindful of the 90-day minimum and retrieval costs of any verification pass.