Some copies should be instant. Mirror sets up Amazon's own S3 Replication between two of your buckets: AWS copies each new object within seconds and moves the data itself, so no job runs on your account.

We handle the fiddly part — the replication rule and the IAM role — and then keep an eye on it. A replication rule is famously fire-and-forget: if someone removes it or turns versioning off, nothing tells you and the copy quietly stops. We check, and we tell you.

Mirror or backup? The question that decides it is: *if someone deletes a file by mistake, should it disappear from the copy too?*

• •Yes — you want a Mirror. It protects you from losing a region or a bucket.
• •No — you want a Backup. It never deletes at the destination, so a mistake can be undone.

Most teams end up with both. The new Protection panel in Analytics shows, per bucket, whether it's mirrored, backed up, or neither — including the buckets nobody has covered yet.

Mirroring needs both buckets to be Amazon S3 with versioning on; where a pair doesn't qualify, BucketPilot now says exactly which condition failed. And note that replication only covers objects written after you switch it on — run a one-off backup to bring across what's already there.