Automatic backup of a local directory to S3

You can use the scripts in this directory to automatically back up a local directory to S3. It's aimed at backing up FoundryVTT worlds, but it will work for any relatively-small set of slowly-changing files.

Steps

• Follow Amazon's Batch upload files to the cloud instructions to:

  • Create an S3 bucket (if you don't already have one)
    • NOTE TO FOUNDRY VTT USERS: I strongly recommend that you do not use your Foundry data S3 bucket for backups. Foundry requires that it be publicly readable, which means anyone would be able to see your backup data. Do you really want your dumb chat log jokes (and maybe your license key, depending on what you back up) just hanging out there?
  • Create an IAM user that can read/write the bucket (or grant an existing user read/write permissions)
  • Install and configure the aws tool with that user's credentials

• Read the header comment of backup-to-s3.sh and ensure the prerequisites are met.

• Clone this repo (s3-backup-cron) to your local system. For example:

  mkdir /tmp/s3backup
  cd /tmp/s3backup
  git clone git@bitbucket.org:dbort/s3-backup-cron.git
  cd s3-backup-cron

• Run ./install.sh and answer the questions.

• Run crontab -e and paste the recommended line into the cron file. See https://crontab.guru/ for help with changing when and how often it runs.

That should do it! You can watch the log file (defaults to a file under ~/var/log) to see if it succeeded or failed.

To try it without waiting all night, copy the command from the crontab line (skipping past the asterisks), paste into a bash shell, then look at the log file.

Possible future improvements

• Support multiple directories.
• Encrypt backups or at least give them zip passwords.
• Add options for picking archive formats other than zip.