Is it safe to assume that removing an AWS S3 Bucket Lifecycle Policy will not affect already transitioned objects?

Question

I have an S3 bucket on which I activated a Lifecycle Policy that transitions objects to Glacier class storage after 14 days.

I desire to disable this policy.

Is it safe to assume that disabling/deleting the Lifecycle Policy will not alter/affect the already transitioned objects in any way?

This links specifies what happens to transition scheduling, in the event of Policy deletion. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-set-lifecycle-configuration-intro.html Although it would seem evident, I didn't find it to imply about already transitioned objects remaining untouched.

My concern with this is critical due to AWS:Glacier having extreme costs for retrieval over 5% of total Glacier usage, but also for deleting files prior to 90 days.

Hard to imagine that it would actively do anything except disable the policy and by implication cancel any future actions that the policy would have caused to be invoked. You might want to ask at the S3 forum (forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=24) for confirmation as I'd expect AWS support to be more active there, or file a support ticket, or you could even test it out on a sample bucket. — jarmod

Mircea Mircea · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-18T16:51:50

The lifecycle policy works on the bucket itself. When you delete it/disable it, it stops performing the defined actions.

It will NOT perform actions to reverse anything. This includes glacier, deleted files, moved files, etc.

Is it safe to assume that removing an AWS S3 Bucket Lifecycle Policy will not affect already transitioned objects?

1 Answers