Infrequent Access storage option

Prices for Standard – IA start at $0.0125 / gigabyte / month (one and one-quarter US pennies), with a 30 day minimum storage duration for billing, and a $0.01 / gigabyte charge for retrieval (in addition to the usual data transfer and request charges). Further, for billing purposes, objects that are smaller than 128 kilobytes are charged for 128 kilobytes of storage. This pricing model will make this new storage class economical for long-term storage, backups, and disaster recovery, while still allowing customers to quickly retrieve older data if necessary.

You can define data lifecycle policies that move data between Amazon S3 storage classes over time. For example, you could store freshly uploaded data using the Standard storage class, move it to Standard – IA 30 days after it has been uploaded, and then to Amazon Glacier after another 60 days have gone by.

The new Standard – IA storage class is one of several attributes associated with each S3 object. Because the objects stay in the same S3 bucket and are accessed from the same URLs when they transition to Standard – IA, you can start using Standard – IA immediately through lifecycle policies without changing your application code. This means that you can add a policy and reduce your S3 costs immediately, without having to make any changes to your application or affecting its performance.