Amazon Glacier - cheaper cloud storage for long-term storage

Amazon introduces Glacier, a new web storage service with cheaper storage tariffs than the company's S3 simple storage service. Glacier provides cheap storage for business-critical archiving and long-term storage, but the catch is that your data is not instantly retrievable. Data is stored in archives which can represent a single or multiple files, and to be able to download these archives you need to initiate a retrieval job. Amazon says jobs will typically be complete in 3 to 5 hours.

Amazon promises an annual durability of 99.999999999%, your data is stored at multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. Storage pricing starts at $0.01 per gigabyte per month, depending on the location of where you want to store your data, but there are also costs involved for retrieving data. Downloading less than 5 percent of your data per month is free, after that you need to pay a fixed amount per gigabyte.

Full details and pricing can be found at Amazon Glacier.