Yes, You need to keep application running until glacier upload complete? You can also look for Uploading Large Archives in Parts option (Multipart Upload).
Upload and download are different in Glacier.
Retrieving an archive from Amazon Glacier is a two-step process:
- Initiate an archive retrieval job : It approximately takes 4-5 hours to complete. When you initiate a job, Amazon Glacier returns a job ID in the response and executes the job asynchronously. So in this case you don't need to application running.
- You can also specify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to which Amazon Glacier can post a notification after the job is completed. Amazon Glacier sends notification only after it completes the job.
- After the job completes, you can download the job output.
[Disclousre : Bucket Explorer]