If I create a Glacier Vault with a 5 year policy to not remove it, will I have to pay upfront? If not, what will happen if I can’t pay? Also, what if I close my account?
1 Answers
Hi, this is a great question!
You won’t need to pay up front for it, you will still be billed monthly as usual.
The use of a vault lock policy is to protect your files from deletion, rather to lock you in to paying for them, however in creating the policy, you are committing to keep the files in Glacier for the defined period of, so do be careful when setting up this kind of thing.
And according to the FAQs, you won’t be able to delete the vault if it still has files in it:
You may delete any S3 Glacier vault that does not contain any archives using the AWS Management Console, the Amazon Glacier direct APIs or the SDKs. Once a vault has been deleted, you can then re-create a vault with the same name. If your vault contains archives, you must delete all the archives before deleting the vault.
https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/
If you then decide to close your account, they will simply delete everything and all your data will be removed and you won’t pay any more. (so before closing the account you would need to back up anything that you need to keep, outside of AWS)
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/close-aws-account/
Usually Vault Lock policies are used for those situations where you have a regulatory requirement to keep data for a set time period before it can be deleted. So in most cases you should know how long you are required by law to keep the data and set up your vault lock policy accordingly,
hope that helps!
Faye