amazon-web-services – How to Enable Amazon S3 Versioning for Existing Objects

You add a cache-control unfortunately, at the individual item level within S3. I don't know if you can do this at the bucket level.

You can however do this for multiple items at once using a 3rd party tool, like CloudBerry Explorer

I have done this for some items, here's a screenshot from the AWS web console:

the value is in seconds.

S3 also supports versioning but I've not personally had a play with it.

In terms of Cloudfront, you'll only need to mess around with it to invalidate old versions of documents. i.e. you've changed the index.html file and you need Cloudfront to immediately delete it's (now) out of date copy. Invalidate the file, and users browsing the site will get the updated copy from S3.

I have read about the versioning feature for S3 buckets, but I cannot seem to find if >recovery is possible for files with no modification history. See the AWS docs here on >versioning:

I've just tried this. Yes, you can restore from the original version. When you delete the file it makes a delete marker and you can restore the version before that, i.e: the single, only, revision.

Then, we thought we may just backup the S3 files to Glacier using object lifecycle >management:

But, it seems this will not work for us, as the file object is not copied to Glacier but >moved to Glacier (more accurately it seems it is an object attribute that is changed, but >anyway...).

Glacier is really meant for long term storage, which is very infrequently accessed. It can also get very expensive to retrieve a large portion of your data in one go, as it's not meant for point-in-time restoration of lots of data (percentage wise).

Finally, we thought we would create a new bucket every month to serve as a monthly full >backup, and copy the original bucket's data to the new one on Day 1. Then using something >like duplicity (http://duplicity.nongnu.org/) we would synchronize the backup bucket every >night.

Don't do this, you can only have 100 buckets per account, so in 3 years you'll have taken up a third of your bucket allowance with just backups.

So, I guess there are a couple questions here. First, does S3 versioning allow recovery of >files that were never modified?

Yes

Is there some way to "copy" files from S3 to Glacier that I have missed?

Not that i know of