Amazon S3 bucket are containers for objects (the files you store on s3). I would explain how to make back up of your files from EC2 machine to amazon s3 bucket.

• Create a S3 account. If you already have an account ,move to step two. Else click here
• Download your aws access key and aws secret access key.
  • You can download them from your security credentials menu.
• Now download and install s3fs. You can Download
• Install these prerequisites before installing.

yum install gcc 
yum install libstdc++-devel 
yum install gcc-c++ 
yum install fuse 
yum install fuse-devel 
yum install curl-devel 
yum install libxml2-devel 
yum install openssl-devel 
yum install mailcap 

• Installation Steps
Unzip the downloaded s3fs-1.61.tar.gz and follow steps further

tar xvzf s3fs-1.61.tar.gz 
cd s3fs-1.61/ 
./configure --prefix=/usr 
make 
make install (as root) 

• Create a file named .passwd-s3fs in your root directory.

Vi .passwd-s3fs

• Write your access key id and secret access key in the format as aws_access_key:aws_secret_key
  • Change its mode as “chmod 600 ~/.passwd-s3fs “ so that no other group has access to it.
  • save and exit
• In this method we will create a mount point for your bucket in your machine, So that everything you put in that directory(mount point) will be automatically moved to S3 bucket.
  • To mount your S3 bucket run

  s3fs -o allow_other bucket_name /mnt/your_directory_name
  

  • This is the directory where you will put your files to move to S3
  • To copy files to your S3 bucket run rsync. Read the note below before executing this command

  rsync -av  /you_directory_path_to_files  /mnt/your_directory_name
  

  • [Note] --delete command is to ensure that if you delete files from your bucket it will be deleted from your machine too.
• If you have issues in building “make” or ./config your s3fs , then you may be running an older version of FUSE. Update that manually as
  • Download Latest Fuse

                   tar xvzf fuse-2.8.6.tar.gz
                    cd fuse-2.8.6
                   ./configure –prefix=/usr
                    make 
                    make install

• To check if installation is correct, run

modprobe fuse

If it runs clean, OK

Else it may show an error

FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.16.33-xenU/modules.dep: No such file or directory

• In such case, download http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-modules-2.6.16.33-xenU-x86_64.tgz extract

tar xvf ec2-modules-2.6.16.33-xenU-x86_64.tgz
cd lib/modules
cp -r * /lib/modules/