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Some customers desire to have backups of their sites placed within their own Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Dropbox account. This is in addition to the off-site backups we create ourselves.

We use UpdraftPlus to place site backups in multiple locations. Since backup software will be writing to an account you own, permissions need to be granted to write the files into your account. We deliver the backups without knowing your account credentials.

This article offers an overview of what you, the customer, needs to do to allow UpdraftPlus access to Amazon S3 storage. This article explains in greater technical detail. in short, access is accomplished by giving bucket-level permissions to an IAM user. This gets technical, so if you need an AWS expert to set this up for you for a fee, please ask us.

High-level Instructions

  • Go to Amazon AWS S3
  • Set up a bucket where the backups are to be stored, such as https://s3.amazonaws.com/[your folder]
  • Go to AWS Key Management Service
  • Create an access key and secret key
  • Do not use your master API key + secret (which can access all your S3 data). Instead, set up a separate IAM user.
  • Set a policy for the bucket for a specific IAM user
  • Set that policy on the bucket
  • Contact We Do WordPress with the bucket path, access key, secret key and sites you desire backed-up into your storage. We will configure UpdraftPlus and test a file to your storage.
  • Once we confirm permissions are correct, we will begin having daily backups run. We will send you a courtesy email.

Important Note

The backup software writes to the bucket. It was designed so it cannot delete files. You are responsible to delete old backups. Do not let the files keep increasing or your storage costs will rise. We recommend that you set a calendar task to go in weekly/monthly and keep only what you desire.