Updraft AWS S3 backup configuration

We’ve chosen to use the Updraft plugin to perform our site backups. There are about 3 million installations, and it is under active development (with mods made in the last few weeks). It also supports Amazon AWS S3. To do this we create: –

• An AWS Bucket (e.g. kaitak.org)
• An IAM User with a Policy that provides access to the bucket

There’s more than one way to access an Amazon S3 bucket as a backup destination but we created an AWS IAM User, a custom (JSON) Policy, and an Access Key with a use case that’s “Application running outside AWS“.

Our Policy, which limits the user to just our bucket, looks like this: –

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:*",
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::kaitak.org",
                "arn:aws:s3:::kaitak.org/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

With the bucket created, and a User and Policy assigned, we simply have to provide the bucket and access key information in the Updraft Amazon S3 backup configuration, where the following fields need to be set: –

• Amazon S3 access key (you AWS access key’s access key)
• Amazon S3 secret key (your AWS access key’s secret key)
• Amazon S3 location (e.g. kaitak.org)

If all goes well, when you press the Updraft Test Amazon S3 Settings button you’ll see a Success message!