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S3 Plugin

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

This document describes how to protect data stored in Simple Storage Service (S3) endpoints S3 using the Bacula Enterprise S3 Plugin. The S3 plugin provides the ability to download, catalog, and store the data from S3 into any other kind of storage supported by Bacula Enterprise directly, without using any intermediary service.

Why Protect S3?

This is a common question that arises frequently among IT and backup professionals when it comes to any SaaS or Cloud service, so it is important to have clear understanding of the situation.

S3 is a very reliable storage solution, especially when AWS service is used, where we can find the common cloud provider capabilities intended to prevent any data loss. Usually, all data stored in any cloud service is geo-replicated using the underlying cloud infrastructure to have the information stored into several destinations automatically and transparently. Therefore, complete data loss because of hardware failures are very unlikely to happen.

The data is replicated, however there is no other data protection mechanism. Below is a list of challenges when using cloud services to store your data:

No ransomware protection: If data suffers an attack and becomes encrypted, data is lost.
No malicious attacker protection: If data is deleted permanently (all versions of it), data is lost.
No real or global point-in-time recovery.
No automated way to extract any data from the cloud to save it in external places (this could lead to eventual compliance problems).

In particular, backup needs of data stored in S3 depend highly on the usage of the S3 services. An S3 service can be used as a backup repository itself, usually as a second tier backup location. Bacula Enterprise provides its own plugin to cover that need (Cloud Storage Plugin for S3). In this type of scenario, backing up the information again is not really useful.

However, S3 is used today to store all kinds of data, for example for web servers that look for easy, quick and highly available places to access some information from different places of the world or data for analytics among many other use cases.

Usually this kind of processes are not properly controlled to navigate to different states of the data through the time and that can represent a very good reason to employ a backup tool to provide such layer of control and security.