David Fowler shows how to back up SQL Server directly to an AWS S3 bucket:
I’ve been having a little play around with AWS recently and was looking at S3 (AWS’ cloud storage) when I thought to myself, I wonder if it’s possible to backup up an on premise SQL Server database directly to S3?
When we want to backup directly to Azure, we can use the ‘TO URL’ clause in our backup statement. Although S3 buckets can also be accessed via a URL, I couldn’t find a way to backup directly to that URL. Most of the solutions on the web have you backing up your databases locally and then a second step of the job uses Power Shell to copy those backups up to your S3 buckets. I didn’t really want to do it that way, I want to backup directly to S3 with no middle steps. We like to keep things as simple as possible here at SQL Undercover, the more moving parts you’ve got, the more chance for things to go wrong.
So I needed a way for SQL Server to be able to directly access my buckets. I started to wonder if it’s possible to map a bucket as a network drive. A little hunting around and I came across this lovely tool, TNTDrive. TNTDrive will let us do exactly that and with the bucket mapped as a local drive, it was simply a case of running the backup to that local drive.
Quite useful if your servers are in a disk crunch. In general, I’d probably lean toward keeping on-disk backups and creating a job to migrate those backups to S3.