Slow Expedited Restore

Situation

A restore plan with the Expedited retrieval option appears to be stuck or restores a small number of files over several hours.

Cause

According to the AWS documentation, “Expedited retrievals are optimized for the occasional urgent request for a small number of archives. For all but the largest archives (250MB+), data accessed using Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1 – 5 minutes.”

The Expedited retrieval type is not intended to retrieve hundreds or thousands of files; doing so results in longer restore times.

To learn more, refer to the Amazon S3 Glacier FAQs section.

Solution

Consider using the Standard retrieval option when restoring a large number of files. In most cases, it will not only be cheaper but will also optimize the restore time.