How to Backup Amazon S3 with Reverse Cloud

Many IT professionals are starting to think about how to backup Amazon S3 for local retention – i.e. how to do reverse cloud backup. If you’ve wondered how to backup from Amazon S3 buckets to disk so that there is a high speed local copy of cloud data, the NetSwap Plus product might be for you. While several cloud to cloud backup services exist, they have the disadvantage of incurring additional monthly fees and lower performance of the cloud.

Reverse Cloud Backup Amazon S3 NetSwap Setup Screen

The NetSwap backup NAS products can do data transfer to and from Amazon S3, or from multiple Amazon accounts and S3 buckets.  The replication tracks incremental changes. The appliances will allow the user to “reverse cloud” backup Amazon S3 to local disk. This creates the potential for spinning up Amazon EC2 virtual machines under Xen on the NetSwap appliance for testing at faster speeds.

Of course, the reverse is also true – the backup appliance can upload data to Amazon S3. This allows network administrators to use any server backup software they choose to protect multiple servers using the NetSwap Plus backup appliance as the destination, and subsequently upload the data to Amazon S3. NetSwap’s bi-directional backup software connects directly to an Amazon S3 account, and securely transfers backup files and folders to and from the cloud, serving as a transport between your backup NAS device and your Amazon S3 storage account.

To start the reverse cloud backup of an Amazon S3 bucket, simply connect your AWS account to a replication job within the NetSwap Plus as illustrated above. The software comes with a step-by-step Wizard that will guide you through replication and reverse cloud backup Amazon S3 setup processes.

Enterprise backup requires set and forget simplicity. As more data is stored in multiple clouds using a variety of login accounts, it will become increasingly difficult for IT professionals to ensure that corporate intellectual property is protected. Providing an automated reverse cloud to backup Amazon S3 ensures that data also lives on a removable hard drive located on-site. Expect the reverse cloud backup concept to be extended to all kinds of data such as websites, CRM, email accounts, and other mission critical cloud data.