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General Category => Questions => Topic started by: netcircle on September 25, 2009, 02:38:57 AM



Title: Bandwidth transfer for unchanged files
Post by: netcircle on September 25, 2009, 02:38:57 AM
Hello,

Using S3sync to backup S3 data and I have a couple of questions.

1. Is there a bandwidth transfer (and resulting Amazon charge) for files that exist in both the source and destination and are unchanged?

2. What mechanism is used to check that files are unchanged and does that mechanism incur a bandwidth transfer/charge?

If my questions are too vague or silly, please forgive my naivete, but I'm new to this software.

Thanks in advance for your help.


Title: Re: Bandwidth transfer for unchanged files
Post by: ferrix on September 26, 2009, 11:10:32 AM
It uses bucket list operations to pull status data.  By default it uses the md5 and file size to compare.


Title: Re: Bandwidth transfer for unchanged files
Post by: maelcum on November 23, 2009, 09:30:16 AM
1. Is there a bandwidth transfer (and resulting Amazon charge) for files that exist in both the source and destination and are unchanged?
Yes. To compare files, s3sync fetches some information for the file on Amazon S3.

Example:
If you have a zillion files, s3sync needs to compare the zillion Amazon S3 files with the locally stored ones (to find out that nothing has changed. duh. but how else could it be sure.). There is little information flowing back to your machine, but each file is at least touched once. Resulting in a zillion times access. Amazon will bill you for that, and for the little traffic that was generated.

The total amount obviously depends on how often you care to check. If you are sure things change little, check less frequently. If you use S3 as a backup and have fewer files, it might not make much of a difference to to it more often.