AWS S3 for Glacier: Was backup work in progress?

Question

I'm experimenting with backing up data in my Amazon S3 folders on Glacier using personal cycle management options. I selected one of the folders in the bucket for testing and created a life cycle rule that states that objects with this prefix must be transferred to the glacier after 30 days. I created the rule today, but these files are older than 30 days, so I expected them to start migrating right away. But I look at this S3 folder and do not notice any changes. How do I know if a backup actually occurred?

Answer 1

The lifecycle management policy (LMP) that you apply will affect all elements that correspond to it, whether they existed before the policy was applied or were created after it was applied. The policy takes time to synchronize across all of your items in S3. See “Managing the Object Life Cycle” before and after “Before You Decide to Archive Objects”.

Objects moved by LMP are visible only through the S3 API, not through the Glacier API or the console. You will continue to see the objects listed in your S3 list, but the object metadata will be updated to indicate that x-amz-storage-class is a glacier. You can see this through the S3 console or make a request for object metadata using the S3 API. See Object Key and Metadata for System-Defined Metadata .