Amazon S3 – How to PUT Files Directly to Glacier

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

I was struggling with this, too, but I found an answer over here https://stackoverflow.com/a/17162973/1750869 that helped resolve this issue for me. Reposting answer below.

You don't have to open permissions to everyone. Use the below Bucket policies on source and destination for copying from a bucket in one account to another using an IAM user

Bucket to Copy from – SourceBucket

Bucket to Copy to – DestinationBucket

Source AWS Account ID - XXXX–XXXX-XXXX

Source IAM User - src–iam-user

The below policy means – the IAM user - XXXX–XXXX-XXXX:src–iam-user has s3:ListBucket and s3:GetObject privileges on SourceBucket/* and s3:ListBucket and s3:PutObject privileges on DestinationBucket/*

On the SourceBucket the policy should be like:

{
"Id": "Policy1357935677554",
"Statement": [
    {
        "Sid": "Stmt1357935647218",
        "Action": [
            "s3:ListBucket"
        ],
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::SourceBucket",
        "Principal": {"AWS": "arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXXX:user/src–iam-user"}
    },
    {
        "Sid": "Stmt1357935676138",
        "Action": ["s3:GetObject"],
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:s3::: SourceBucket/*",
        "Principal": {"AWS": "arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXXX:user/src–iam-user"}
   }
]
}

On the DestinationBucket the policy should be:

{
"Id": "Policy1357935677554",
"Statement": [
    {
        "Sid": "Stmt1357935647218",
        "Action": [
            "s3:ListBucket"
        ],
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:s3::: DestinationBucket",
        "Principal": {"AWS": "arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXXX:user/src–iam-user"}
    },
    {
        "Sid": "Stmt1357935676138",
        "Action": ["s3:PutObject"],
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:s3::: DestinationBucket/*",
        "Principal": {"AWS": "arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXXX:user/src–iam-user"}
   }
]
}

command to be run is s3cmd cp s3://SourceBucket/File1 s3://DestinationBucket/File1