Hosting venti arenas on Amazon S3
I’ve been using Amazon’s S3 storage service for some critical backups. Namely these are things I think are worth having an off-site backup for in case of fire/theft/stupidity, such as my collection of photos (I don’t backup scans as they are too big, and I can scan them again probably). I started off using s3fuse for accessing s3 buckets, and this worked ok. Sadly, it does have some disadvantages such as leaving the management of incrementals etc. completely up to you. There are other bits of software such as duplicity that bundle things into tar filed, do incremental backups, and upload to s3 buckets, but this style of backup is far too painful and error prone (think Bacula). Also I had some weird problems with rsync.
What I really wanted was a venti server backed by s3, and lo and behold somebody else already had the idea. Thanks to this marvellous work we can simply setup the s3 backed arenas and start vac(1)ing.
After fetching the s3venti from sources I found it didn’t compile on my p9p installation. Luckily the patch was trivial:
ventidat.h:
134a135
> VtMaxLumpSize = 65536,
After that everything compiled and seems to be working mostly perfectly. I did discover however that EU hosted buckets don’t work. It’s not too critical but if I have time I’ll dig into it a bit further and write a patch.
