Chapter 7. S3: cheap, fast system backups
As you’ve seen, using S3 to store the application data you’re actively using makes a lot of sense. But that’s not the only valuable role the service can play. S3 is also a great place to host your regular backups of, say, older data you’re not currently using but aren’t ready to delete, or the system files currently running your server.
Tip
You do generate regular backups, don’t you? You know what they call people who don’t actively plan for significant resource failures? Unemployed.
In this chapter, we’ll talk about how important it is to back up your data, and how backups relate to the needs and opportunities unique to AWS-based data. We’ll also discuss how backups of AWS resources can work differently from the kinds of backup operations you may be familiar with from local deployments.
Specifically, I’ll demonstrate two approaches to managing backups on AWS:
- Having AWS take a snapshot (make a complete copy) of an AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume your EC2 instance is using and save it to S3
- Using local OS tools to compress your data into an archive file that will then be sent to an S3 bucket you specify for storage