What is s3archive ?

s3archive is a simple python script which can be used to archive the content of an Amazon S3 bucket. It is a quick and dirty wrapper around Tim Kay's aws. It can be used to backup the files you store on S3.

Download

S3archive is available both as a Pacman package (x86_64 only), or in source form. For source or Pacman installation, please refer to the Generic download and install instructions.

• Latest source tarball
• PGP signature

Basic concepts

The task of s3archive is very basic: given a prefix (or "path"), download all objects stored on S3 whose name begins with the prefix. Those objects will be stored in a regular local directory I call an archive.

If s3archive is run again with the same prefix to archive, it will keep or remove the previous archive depending on user requirements. More precisely, s3archive has to be given the number of archives to keep on the local filesystem.

s3archive does not implement compression, differential archives, or other fancy stuff. It is meant as a very basic and simple tool.

Usage

s3archive takes exactly three arguments

1. The prefix or S3 path to backup, formed as follows: $bucket/$prefix, for example if you want to backup all files with path foo/bar in the bucket baz, then the argument should be baz/foo/bar.
2. The directory where to store your archives.
3. The number of archives of the given path to keep on the local filesystem. Note that if there are more than that number, the oldest will be deleted to make room for the new one.

In addition, one command line option can be given: --awsopts, which can be used to specify additionnal, space-separated options to pass to aws.