- How the "Use
Glacier" function works when performing archives:
- Select the "use
glacier" checkbox in the archive process and choose your desired S3
bucket
- Ensure there are no
lifecycle policy rules set on the S3 bucket you have chosen for the
archive. If the bucket is moved to Glacier, the job will start failing
immediately after the move.
- Data and metadata will be
written to the S3 bucket chosen.
- The datafile.bin file will
be marked for storage in glacier and will be moved to glacier within
24-48 hours by a background AWS job. Rapid Recovery has not control over
how quickly data is moved to Glacier.
- Once moved, the datafile.bin
file cannot be seen in the S3 bucket
- To view the datafile.bin you
need to connect to Glacier with an S3 file browsing utility such as S3
Browser and run a "get inventory" command. You must wait for a
few hours while that command runs and populates the list of files in that
Glacier Vault (every action in Glacier takes a long time to complete
which is why the storage is so cheap)
- Scheduled incremental
archives are compatible with the "use Glacier" archive feature
since the core uses the metadata in S3 to validate the contents of
previous archives and then creates a new incremental archive in the S3
bucket and marks the datafile.bin for move to Glacier. This allows
incremental updates of your archives while using Glacier to store the
data.
Unfortunately,
all scheduled incremental archives written with versions of Rapid Recovery
6.1.3 and older and then moved to Glacier with an AWS Bucket Lifecycle Policy
will fail after upgrade to 6.2.0. Rapid Recovery 6.2.0 implements logic to
better validate the data within archives before performing an incremental
update of the archive. To do this the Rapid Recovery core must read the
metadata in the archive and when a bucket has been moved to Glacier, it is no
longer available for read and so the Rapid Recovery core receives an error from
Glacier when trying to access the needed metadata.
There is no upgrade path for scheduled incremental archive jobs stored in
Glacier with versions of Rapid Recovery 6.1.3 and older. Our recommendation is
to create a new scheduled incremental archive using the "use Glacier"
option (available in RR 6.2.0 and newer) and begin archiving your data to an S3
bucket without a Lifecycle Policy configured.