Dear Amazon Glacier Customer,

We are pleased to announce support for Range Retrievals. You can now retrieve specific ranges of your Amazon Glacier Archives, providing you even more flexibility to manage and lower your costs.

Amazon Glacier is designed for storing data that is infrequently accessed, and as such, you can retrieve up to 5% of your data, pro-rated daily, for free each month. Range Retrievals can be used to increase your savings on AWS Glacier. In the rare cases where you retrieve more than 5% of your data, you can use Range Retrievals to help you stay within your 5% free retrieval band. For example, you can retrieve a large archive as a series of smaller range retrievals, spread out over longer periods of time, which can reduce or eliminate retrieval fees. Similarly, if you combine multiple files that you upload as a single Amazon Glacier Archive, and you only need to retrieve a selection of those files, you can now retrieve only the range that contains the files you need, which again can reduce or eliminate your retrieval fees.

The introduction of Range Retrievals makes Amazon Glacier – already an extremely low-cost storage service – even more cost-effective for data archiving and backup.

To retrieve a specific range of an archive, you simply provide a byte range when initiating the retrieval job to retrieve your data from Amazon Glacier. Once the job completes, the specified range is then available for you to download. (Read more about jobs in the Amazon Glacier Developer Guide).

We added support for this feature in response to requests from our customers. If there are other features you would like to see us build, please visit our forum and let us know. To learn more about Range Retrievals, visit the Amazon Glacier Developer Guide.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Glacier Team