I was getting charged almost $15USD per month from Amazon Glacier backup (AWS)

Glacier is supposed to be a very cheap backup. So, I started digging

I stopped the backup on the NAS and was hoping to delete this archive, waited over a month, and still no luck to delete the files.

I found out that my default was set to US East (N.Virginia). The vault on US East(Virginia) contained 2.3GB of data which did not make sense that I was being charged that $15USD for that. After digging around, I found two other archives setup on US East(Ohio) were equal to 3.6TB of usage.

**Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to just DELETE the vaults. When clicking on the Delete Vault button, an error pops up.”Error deleting vault”.

Here is where it gets a little complicated. To access the contents easily, we must download and install a 3rd party app called CloudBerry. (there are others, but this one is FREE and works great.) Here’s how I did it.

Steps to delete the contents of your Glacier Vault

1. Before opening CloudBerry, we need to create some Credentials to login to Amazon Glacier. From your AWS Console https://aws.amazon.com/console/)

2. Go to My Security Credentials – Under the Username Menu.

3. Expand Access Keys – and click the ‘Create New Access Key’ Button.
You can then Copy and Paste your Access Key & Security Key to a notepad for CloudBerry.

4. Then Click on Source Drop Down and Select. and New Storage Account

5. Pick Amazon Glacier

6. Enter the Access key & Secret Key from your notepad information obtained earlier.

7. Now you should be able to see the content of your AWS Account. Pick your Glacier Backup and you can see your Vaults. (Unfortunately you still can’t just delete them from there). That would be too easy.

8. Select the Vault you would like to work with, Right Click and Get Inventory.

9. Once the Inventory has been completed you will then be able to see the contents of the Vault and delete them. (names are encrypted, but since I will restart the backup, I will delete all of them.)

NOTE: Do not try to Select All – Your system will likely lock up like mine if there are a lot of files in there.

10. Select a group of files at a time to delete and delete them. (Use Shift + Page Down to select pages of files and press the DELETE key).

*I will be honest, this took a while to to. In the span of hours, luckily the connection stayed, I was able to login to my PC and highlight a large group and delete them then go back.

*I will be setting this all up again, but making sure that only the backup files are actually backed up to the Cloud Drive and that the purging of old backups is actually working.