Tips for S3 storage¶
Versioning of file contents¶
The S3 system allows you to enable versioning on a per-bucket basis. This means that whenever a file gets overwritten, the S3 system will keep the old contents alongside with the new content, using the same object name.
In order to request older file versions, your clients need to have support for it, and not all S3 clients do.
S3 Browser¶
S3 Browser looks like this if you view a bucket with versioning enabled and press the Versions panel:
CyberDuck¶
CyberDuck needs to enable Show hidden files from the View menu, then
you can get old versions listed in grey underneath the latest active
version.
Pros and Cons of versioning¶
For safety reasons, enabling versioning on a bucket can prevent data loss in case one accidentally overwrites something on the S3 storage meant to be kept. Since S3 is not a file system per se but rather an object storage which often represents data like it was files and folders, handling permissions might be trickier than on a local disk and then versioning might help recovering from inadvertent changes.
On the other hand, the storage will charge you for the full extent of stored data, even if some clients will not let you see the hidden versions, so you might be surprised to see usage exceed the sum of the sizes of the visible files. Versioning is off by default, so this can only happen if you deliberately enable it on a particular bucket.
You need to be careful when acting on old versions of files, the GUI tools tend to move back to the active version if you move about in the software. In my examples above, the sizes of the files makes it easier to know what the versions were, but that will not always be the case.
In my examples above, the versions had rather big differences in sizes which made it somewhat easy to spot when large changes had occurred to the file, but if your versioned file changes mostly internally and not so much in size, it will be a manual task to download different versions and look into their contents to know which versions is the "good" one, in case there has been a lot of unknown internal changes to its content.