As I wrote in my post last week, I have been playing a bit with how to back up to Amazon S3 on Ubuntu. The simplest method of doing so is to use Duplicity, which have built-in support for backing up to a S3 bucket. That means that the only thing you have to do is to write a backup-script and set it to run whenever you feel like it.

Setting up the backup, I took a lot of inspiration from a blog post at cenolan.com and a blog post by Tim McCormack. Actually, “a lot of inspiration” may be an understatement, as I simply followed their lead. Read their posts for a thorough how-to. A single missing piece of information from both of their posts is that your S3 bucket may be placed in Amazon’s european datacenter, in which case you need to apply the following options to duplicity when running it:
--s3-european-buckets --s3-use-new-style

Besides adding these options, I did little to modify the work of cenolan.com. All credit for the modified backup.sh and backdown.sh goes to him.

Another way to back up to Amazon S3 is to mount it as a FUSE file system, and encrypt the data while rsync’ing it to the file system. That is how I want to set up backup for my laptop, for example. It eases restore and selection of exactly what files to backup (and backdown). How to set up that solution is going to be the subject of another blog post.