For those using S3 CDN for uploads, what methods do you employ to maintain an off-site backup of your files besides relying on the CDN alone? I’m interested in hearing about your backup strategies and any alternative solutions you’ve put in place to ensure data redundancy.
Besides S3? I would just take periodic backups weekly (or monthly) like normal, and store them either on my computer or on the cloud somewhere.
I don’t have any firsthand experience yet, but I’m exploring my options. It seems odd to rely on a single provider without a secondary backup. Ideally, an off-site backup on my other Debian box. The question is how to do it when the uploads are automatically uploaded to CDN.
I suppose you’re using Discourse’s built-in backup feature for uploads. That’s not an option for us. I want to move uploads to a CDN, and there just isn’t enough room on the Discourse instance to host all of them (if there were, there’d be no point in using a CDN). I’d like to back up uploads off-site.
The point of s3 is that it’s safe and you don’t need to back it up. If you do want to pull it down to your local machine you can use a command line s3 client and cron.
The cdn is a content delivery network. It speeds up delivery of data that’s stored on s3, which is typically expensive and relatively slow.
I can imagine a disaster where your Amazon account gets deleted or blocked and you can’t access S3 any more. Similarly for any other provider (of anything) - best to have two independent places to keep your things. Either two providers, or one provider and your home.
Sorry. Indeed that’s true. In fact, I have worked with someone who did, in fact, manage to lose control of their Amazon account and they lost their stuff that was on s3.
No one has ever been sorry to have too many backups (unless, perhaps, they were paying for hundreds of extra copies–I once paid a bunch for egress fees because I had the download s3 to local setting turned on for bsky.app).
There are plenty of ways to sync s3 to a local hard drive. S3cmd is one that I use