How to back up Amazon S3 to Google Cloud Storage

Amazon S3 is durable, but durable is not backed up: a deletion, an overwrite, a bad script or a lost credential all replicate perfectly. A backup is a separate copy — on Google Cloud Storage — refreshed on a schedule and restorable from. That is what this job is.

This job runs on the Business plan (Cloudflare R2 and Google Cloud Storage buckets, Azure sources and server destinations are Business features). Every account starts with a 14-day trial of Pro; see plans.

1. 1.Connect the source. Connect the AWS account with a one-click CloudFormation role you can revoke any time, or an access key with the minimal policy we publish. Then import the bucket under Buckets & Servers → Discover buckets, or create one there.
2. 2.Connect the destination. Create an HMAC key for a service account with Storage Object Admin on the bucket and add it under Credentials. Then import the bucket under Buckets & Servers, or create one there.
3. 3.Open Backups & Migrations and press Create. Choose A bucket as the source and A bucket as the destination, then Continue.

1. 1.The form asks one question first: *if someone deletes a file by mistake, should it disappear from the copy too?* Answer No for a backup that keeps everything. (Yes sets up a mirror — an identical live copy kept by AWS itself, Amazon S3 to Amazon S3 only, with versioning on both buckets.)
2. 2.Pick the source bucket and the destination bucket, and a folder inside each if you want only part of it. Need a fresh destination? Create a new bucket right there — it is used as the destination the moment it exists, versioned if it is for a mirror.
3. 3.Set the schedule — hourly, daily, weekly or monthly, at the time you choose. Daily at night is the usual answer.

1. 1.Press Create Job. Press Run now for a first pass, or wait for the schedule.

Every run is incremental: a file is copied only if its size or timestamp differs from the copy, so a nightly run of a large source moves only the day's changes and finishes in minutes.

When both ends are on the same provider the copy happens server-side and the bytes never leave that provider; between providers, BucketPilot streams each file through, without keeping it.

You can watch it: live progress on the job, a per-file log, and an email when a run finishes or needs attention. Transient errors retry with backoff; a run that fails outright is reported, never silently skipped.

Google Cloud Storage has no object versioning, so the copy holds the latest version of each file. Nothing is ever deleted at the destination by a backup, so a file removed at the source stays in the copy until you remove it yourself.

Every job has a Restore button: it copies from the destination back to the source, only what is missing there, never overwriting a newer file and never deleting anything. A backup you cannot restore from is not a backup, so this is part of the job, not a separate product.