— 3 min read

I’ve recently been toying with my Raspberry Pi mirror including moving it out on to Amazon’s S3. I’ve written an article on how to back up to S3, but that isn’t enough when it comes to serving data from S3.

I needed the ability to RSYNC data from the official Raspberry Pi servers on to mine and then in to S3 and for that I used s3fs and FUSE.

FUSE

You can actually do this successfully without requiring FUSE, just by installing the s3fs binary on to your system, but this only allows the user who mounted to access the mounted bucket and also is not possible via /etc/fstab.

FUSE allows you to implement a filesystem within a userspace program, thus allowing us to give other users access and auto-mount using /etc/fstab.

Installation

Fuse

Installing FUSE is simple

sudo apt-get install fuse-utils

s3fs

We …

 — 2 min read

I have several servers powering syslog including it’s Raspberry Pi mirror, load balancer and email servers. All of my servers are hosted using Linode in their London data centre and have Linode’s back-up system doing both daily and weekly snapshots.

For the app and database servers I do server-side backups storing each website and it’s database in it’s own folder within /backup in case I require a quick back-up to fix something, rather than the server has died.

This is all well and good but I like having an off-site backup too and for that I use S3…

About S3

Amazon’s S3 is pretty cheap and very easy to use. Because only data is going in you don’t pay a transfer fee and the cost of storage is very affordable, you can see a pricing list here.

To do the backup I use a …