Backup your Mac to S3 in 5 minutes
There are many tutorials out there on how to back up your Mac to Amazon S3, but over time this process has been simplified.
Requisites
Before we get started we will need a few things. Also, make sure you have your Amazon S3 access identifiers at hand. You can get those from your AWS account.
- Amazon S3 account
- Mac OS X Leopard
- Terminal Skills
Back it up
In order to keep this under five minutes I am simply going to list the steps required and not going to really go into any major detail. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.
1
Install the S3Sync Ruby Gem. Read more about Ruby Gems here.
sudo gem install s3sync
2
Add your Amazon access identifiers to the top of your .bash_login file.
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
3
Execute the command to backup where "my_backup_bucket" is the name of your bucket.
s3sync -v -r --progress --exclude=".svn" --exclude=".DS_Store" --exclude="Library/Caches" --delete ~/ my_backup_bucket:/
I personally do not like to schedule the backups with a cron because every time it runs I am doing something important. I suggest you create an alias for the command in your .bash_login file like this:
alias backup='s3sync -v -r --progress --exclude=".svn" --exclude=".DS_Store" --exclude="Library/Caches" --delete ~/ my_backup_bucket:/'
Then all you have to do is type "backup" whenever you want to run this command. Easy.
If the Terminal is not your kind of interface or your just want to backup a few folders of important files, I suggest you go with a full blown S3 file manager. Here are some of the applications I have used.
