I changed the lifecycle for a bunch of my buckets on Amazon S3 so their storage class was set to Glacier. I did this using the online AWS Console. I now need those files again.
I know how to restore them back to S3 per file. But my buckets have thousands of files. I wanted to see if there was a way to restore the entire bucket back to S3, just like there was a way to send the entire bucket to Glacier?
I'm guessing there's a way to program a solution. But I wanted to see if there was a way to do it in the Console. Or with another program? Or something else I might be missing?
There isn't a built-in tool for this. "Folders" in S3 are an illusion for human convenience, based on forward-slashes in the object key (path/filename) and every object that migrates to glacier has to be restored individually, although...
Of course you could write a script to iterate through the hierarchy and send those restore requests using the SDKs or the REST API in your programming language of choice.
Be sure you understand how restoring from glacier into S3 works, before you proceed. It is always only a temporary restoration, and you choose the number of days that each object will persist in S3 before reverting back to being only stored in glacier.
Also, you want to be certain that you understand the penalty charges for restoring too much glacier data in a short period of time, or you could be in for some unexpected expense. Depending on the urgency, you may want to spread the restore operation out over days or weeks.