Amazon S3 storage is a popular service to use for storing backup and archive data. Infinite scalability, data tiering capabilities, and low cost make S3 a very attractive platform. While Amazon has an automated-tiering option for S3, there are times when you may want to control how you tier your data . The key is making sure that data lifecycle rules for your S3 bucket align with the minimum retention requirements Amazon has defined for the various S3 tiers. Amazon has thorough documentation on the rules that govern S3 pricing and tiering . There are two details that are worth calling out: Data moved to S3 Infrequent Access (IA) needs to live in IA for at least 30 days. If you access or modify data stored in IA within the first 30 days, the data is migrated back to standard S3 and you are still charged for 30 days of storage in IA. Data moved to Glacier needs to live in Glacier for at least 90 days. Accessing or modifying this data prematurely will result in being charged for the ful...