A wedding archive on cold storage for the price of a coffee a month

Sync Shutter guide · Mac, iPhone, and iPad · needs Sync Shutter Pro and an AWS account

A delivered wedding does not need to be a click away. It needs to exist, somewhere off-site, for the years a client might come back for it. Amazon S3 has storage tiers built for exactly that, and Sync Shutter can upload straight into them from the card. This guide sets it up and works out what it costs, with the numbers shown so you can redo them for your own volume.

The one thing to know first

Set up the destination

In AWS

1. Create a bucket in the region closest to you. Use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens in the name, no dots; Sync Shutter can then address it the way Amazon prefers.
2. Create an IAM user for the app with permission to list that bucket and put objects into it. Sync Shutter never deletes from the bucket and needs no delete permission.
3. Create an access key for that user and keep the secret; AWS shows it once.

In Sync Shutter

1. Settings → S3 Compatible (NAS) → Add. On iPhone and iPad the same section is called S3-Compatible.
2. Endpoint: https://s3.amazonaws.com. With the region filled in, the app sends requests to that region's endpoint so the signature stays valid.
3. Bucket and Region as created, for example us-east-1.
4. Prefix: a folder inside the bucket, for example Weddings.
5. Storage Class: pick a tier. The app describes each one; the table below has the prices.
6. Access Key ID and Secret Key from the IAM user. Both go in the Keychain.
7. Test Connection, then Save. Then back up one small card and check the object appears in the console with the tier you chose before trusting it with a wedding.

Turn on Organize files by date so each wedding lands under its own date folder, and consider RAW+JPEG Pairs → RAW Only so the camera JPEGs are not archived twice over.

The tiers

Prices are for US East (N. Virginia), from the AWS price list for S3 and S3 Glacier Deep Archive published 31 August 2026, checked 2 September 2026. Other regions differ; check the page for yours.

Two more lines on the bill: uploads cost $0.03 per 1,000 objects into Glacier Flexible Retrieval and $0.05 per 1,000 into Deep Archive, and every archived object carries 40 KB of billable metadata. Downloading to the internet is free for the first 100 GB in a month and $0.09/GB after that.

What a year costs

Assumptions: 1 TB is 1,024 GB; files average 40 MB, so 1 TB is about 26,000 objects; the archive is written once and left alone. Storage cost is price × GB × 12.

The small print for 1 TB in Deep Archive: the 40 KB per-object overhead is about 1 GB, under a cent a month, and the upload requests come to about $1.31 once. Those round to nothing. The 180-day minimum does not: a wedding uploaded and deleted after a month is still billed for six.

What getting one back costs

Download is the larger cost on a big restore. That is the trade: a year of Deep Archive for 1 TB costs less than one full restore of it.

Which tier

• Deep Archive for delivered weddings you keep for the contract period. Cheapest by a wide margin; you will wait half a day for a redelivery request, which clients accept if you tell them.
• Glacier Flexible Retrieval if a redelivery within the hour is part of your service. Half again the price, and bulk restores are free.
• Standard only for the S3 copy you actually work from, or for any endpoint that is not Amazon. A NAS, MinIO, Backblaze B2, or Wasabi can reject an upload that asks for a tier.

Keep the working copy on the Mac or a NAS. The archive tier is the second copy, and the reason it can be this cheap is that you almost never touch it.

Related guides

• Back up SD cards to a Synology NAS from a Mac
• RAW+JPEG: keep both, RAW only, or JPEG only