Comments on: Using Amazon EC2/EBS/S3 for automated backups

By: mark

mark — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 02:26:15 +0000

I know this is an old post, but the script you mention in the post doesn’t appear to be here.. Do you have that script available to share yet?

By: Kevin Dahlhausen

Kevin Dahlhausen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:41:51 +0000

Thanks for posting your backup script. I’m brand new to EC2, but have your script working under cygwin without any heartache at all.

By: Kieran Shaw

Kieran Shaw — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:00:53 +0000

Hi John, thanks for the comment.

I prefer this approach to S3 for a number of reasons.

First, it allows rsync which is a great way to backup, as far as I know, you can’t do that to S3 because S3 is not a file system, it is just a bucket of keys with objects against them more or less.

Secondly, you can easily attach this volume to your EC2 instances and just browse it as if it was a real file system and copy file and hell even run a database on it. No luck doing that with S3 unless you use one of the nasty hacky S3 file system drivers people have tried out!

By: John Hartnup

John Hartnup — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:49:39 +0000

Interesting approach – have you compared this price-wise with S3?

There’s a few options for doing incremental backups to S3. One I looked at was “brackup”, a Perl script.