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, resulting in longer restore times.

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

Solution

Consider to use the Standard retrieval option when restoring a large amount of files. In most cases, it will not only be a cheaper option, but will optimize the restore time as well.