rsync like functionality

[jkuepper]

Hi Guys,

first of all thank you very much for your fine work in creating such easy access to AWS Glacier!

I just started to use AWS in order to get an offsite archive (backup) of my new private NAS (Synology DS212j). I have successfully installed boto and amazon-glacier-cmd-interface on it and can upload data, lsvault, etc.

Now, I would like to use that as an backup facility in the rsync spirit. However, I seem not be able to figure out how to do that. What am I missing? How do people approach this? Where do I start learning about this? (I have accumulated experience in Un*x and Python in general, i.e., 20 years.)

Thank you very much for your consideration. All hints are welcome.

Best wishes, Jochen

[ikatson]

I'm not the author, but let me answer that.

Short answer, you can do that only partially, and only with a custom script, which uses this tool with some others.

This great tool follows the Unix-way philosophy of doing only one thing, but doing it great. So what it does great is work with Amazon Glacier API from command line.

The API allows you to store files and retrieve delayed results about what is stored there. Glacier cannot store tree-like hierarchies, e.g. directories and files inside them. Neither it can do any incremental update logic, which you may want, and in which rsync shines.

So you should write your own script that for example:

• creates incremental backups and stores them in one file.
• uses this tool to upload this generated file to glacier periodically.