GlacierVault

A self-hosted backup appliance that makes cheap AWS Glacier Deep Archive as simple as possible: you bring AWS credentials, it handles the rest. One Docker container with a web UI — it deploys the AWS infrastructure with CDK, schedules encrypted Rustic backups into Deep Archive, and walks restores through Glacier retrieval with a private CloudFront distribution for free-egress downloads and Apprise notifications when jobs finish.

Built on

• Rustic — the backup engine (encrypted, deduplicated repositories)
• glacier-cold-storage-cdk — the CDK project that provisions the S3/SQS/IAM infrastructure
• warmup-s3-archives — restores archived S3 objects via Batch Operations before download
• Apprise — notification dispatch (Discord, Slack, Telegram, email, ntfy, webhooks, …)

Thought process

• Deep archive is dirt-cheap but retrieval can be a pain
• Bulk retrieval is cheap($2.50 per TB)
• 1TB per month egress from AWS through Cloudfront is free
• PUT/GET request need to be managed intelligently
• Warmup process takes a while
• Wouldn't it be nice to have this all in a single app

Quick start

1. Create a setup IAM user in the AWS console (it deploys real infrastructure, so it needs broad permissions — use once, then delete it). See docs/setup.md for the exact policy.
2. Run the container:

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  glaciervault:
    # Prebuilt image from tagged releases (ghcr.io/pete1450/glaciervault).
    # To build locally instead, see "Building the image yourself" in docs/setup.md.
    image: ghcr.io/pete1450/glaciervault:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - INITIAL_PASSWORD=changeme   # web UI login
    volumes:
      - glaciervault-config:/config
      - glaciervault-database:/database
      - glaciervault-cache:/cache
      - glaciervault-logs:/logs
      # Mount the folders you want to back up (read-only):
      - /home:/mnt/home:ro

volumes:
  glaciervault-config:
  glaciervault-database:
  glaciervault-cache:
  glaciervault-logs:

docker compose up -d

The compose file pulls the prebuilt image for the latest tagged release. To build the image yourself, see docs/setup.md.

3. Open http://localhost:8080 and follow the setup wizard: paste your AWS key/secret/region, review the resource estimate, and hit Deploy Infrastructure. CDK bootstrap + deploy takes 5–10 minutes, then the app initializes the backup repositories and provisions the CloudFront free-egress path automatically.
4. Add a backup source on the Backups page (name, source paths, schedule) and you're done — or press Run now for the first backup.

Docs

Everything else lives in docs/:

• Setup — IAM user creation, wizard walkthrough, teardown
• User workflow — backups, snapshots, restores, costs in practice
• Cost guide — verified AWS pricing with worked examples
• Design — architecture and theory
• Goals — what this optimizes for (and what it doesn't)
• Pages — tour of every UI page