What is Freezer

Freezer is an incremental backup command-line tool for Amazon Glacier (à la git).

Amazon Glacier is one of the cheapest solution for backup files (~$1 for 100GB/month), but Amazon doesn't provide an incremental backup tool. This is why I created this one.

How to compile

$ sbt assembly

It generates a big jar file in the target directory

How to use

Create a Amazon AWS account

Go to Amazon AWS website and create an account, then save your credentials to a property file. The default location freezer use is ~/.aws.glacier.credentials

Initializing a directory as a backup

$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ ... create files ...
$ fz init
VaultName [myproject]: <return>
Credential location [/Users/username/.aws.glacier.credentials]: <return>
Endpoint [https://glacier.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/]: <return>
Exclusions (comma separated) []: \.git.*,.DS_Store
$

This will create a subdirectory .freezer with metadata files.

Backuping a directory

$ fz backup
Uploading new file: toto.txt
Uploading new file: src/toto/titi.rs
Uploading new file: src/toto/tutu.rs

The backup is incremental, only the new/modified/deleted files will be updated

$ fz backup
Updating modified file: src/toto/tutu.rs
Removing deleted file: toto.txt
$ fz backup
Everything up-to-date.

Requesting an Inventory

$ fz inventory
Inventory in progress (JobID: 'axx9MARjzksM6cG0QAbPsPLQlcah5M')

Amazon Glacier usually takes about 4 hours to complete an inventory, so be patient.

$ fz inventory
src/toto/titi.rs
src/toto/tutu.rs

Restoring an backup

Restoring a backup happens in two steps. The first one is requesting and retreiving an inventory (this usually takes a few hours), the second step is requesting an archive retrieval for every file in the inventory (this also takes a few hours).

$ fz restore myproject
Inventory in progress (JobID: 'axx9MARjzksM6cG0QAbPsPLQlcah5M')

Later...

$ fz restore myproject
Requesting download for: 'src/toto/titi.rs'
Requesting download for: 'src/toto/tutu.rs'

Later...

$ fz restore myproject
Server still preparing: 'src/toto/titi.rs'
Server still preparing: 'src/toto/tutu.rs'

You didn't wait long enough, what about now?

$ fz restore myproject
Downloading 'src/toto/titi.rs'
Downloading 'src/toto/tutu.rs'

Finally!