Amazon's new glacier service would be a nice special remote to support for
long-term archival.

The main difficulty is that glacier is organized into vaults, and accessing
a file in a vault takes ~4 hours. A naive implementation would make `git
annex get` wait for 4 hours, which is certianly not reasonable.

One approach I am pondering is to make each glacier vault a separate
special remote. You could then request git-annex to spin up a remote, and
come back later, and be able to access the data stored in it (need to check
if glacier would also allow adding new data to it then). This is
conceptually similar to using git-annex with offline removable drives,
except with glacier, you have a controllable robot to get them plugged in. :)

Ideally, git-annex would arrange for glacier to send it a message when the
vault becomes available, and the user could queue a list of commands to
run, or files to transfer, at that point.

--[[Joey]]

> [[done]]! --[[Joey]]

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> In the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies.

-- <http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_should_I_choose_between_Amazon_Glacier_and_Amazon_S3>

>> They did, but it's IMHO not very useful for git-annex. It's rather
>> intended to allow aging S3 storage out to Glacier. --[[Joey]]