Amazon has announced a new low cost storage option for data archiving and backup.

Amazon Glacier is described as a secure, reliable and low cost storage service designed for data that won’t be frequently accessed, but that you still need to retain for future reference. The data needs to be low priority enough for retrieval times of several hours to be acceptable. The costs are as low as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, and you can choose to store large or small amounts of data.

Data is stored in Glacier as archives that are uploaded as a single archive, though they can contain multiple files. The archives are organized in vaults, and you can control access to your vaults using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. If you need to retrieve an archive, you initiate a job that will typically complete in 3.5 to 4.5 hours.

You can monitor the status of your Amazon Glacier jobs using the Amazon Glacier APIs, so could include the process within your applications. You can also choose to have your vault send you a notification via the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) when it completes.

Amazon Glacier is currently available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), EU-West (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Japan) Regions.