Deleting a large number of Versions from Amazon S3 Bucket

Question

Ok so I have a slight problem I have had a back up program running on a NAS to an Amazon S3 bucket and have had versioning turned enabled on the bucket. The NAS stores around 900GB of data.

I've had this running for a number of months now, and have been watching the bill go up and up for the cost of Amazons Glacier service (which my versioning lifecycle rules stored objects in). The cost has eventually got so high that I have had to suspend Versioning on the bucket in an effort to stop any more costs.

I now have a large number of versions on all our objects screenshot example of one file:

I have two questions:

1. I'm currently looking for a way to delete this large number of versioned files, from Amazons own documentation it would appear I have to delete each version individually is this correct? If so what is the best way to achieve this? I assume it would be some kind of script which would have to list each item in a bucket and issue a DELETEVERSION to each versioned object? This would be a lot of requests and I guess that leads onto my next question.
2. What are the cost implications of deleting a large amount of Glacier objects in this way? It seems cost of deletion of objects in Glacier is expensive, does this also apply to versions created in S3?

Happy to provide more details if needed,

Thanks

Answer 1

Deletions from S3 are free, even if S3 has migrated the object to glacier, unless the object has been in glacier for less than 3 months, because glacier is intended for long-term storage. In that case, only, you're billed for the amount of time left (e.g., for an object stored for only 2 months, you will be billed an early deletion charge equal to 1 more month).

You will still have to identify and specify the versions to delete, but S3 accepts up to 1000 objects or versions (max 1k entites) in a single multi-delete request.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/multiobjectdeleteapi.html