Cloud storage - How long is data kept?

Question

I've been looking at Amazon S3 but no where can I find anything on how long they keep data for if it isn't accessed etc. I therefore assume it's just kept forever, but that seems a bit absurd.

Any ideas? Thanks :)

Answer 1

Why does it seem absurd? It's not absurd at all. The data is kept until you delete it.

Answer 2

It's kept as long as you don't delete it and as long as you pay for it of course. This is not a free service :)

Answer 3

S3 charges per GB for storage (though not very much). So as long as you are paying, they are storing.

See their pricing chart on the S3 main page.

The expectation is that most people using S3 will be regularly using it for data transfer - this is what Amazon cares about, not the storage itself, which is very cheap. So they make their money on bandwidth (and moreover, on the other services that interface nicely with S3).

Of course, they don't guarantee that your data will always be there. See the SLA for specific information regarding data retention policies.

Disclosure: I am a former AWS employee.