This Would Have Been Nice Earlier

I’m a little paranoid about my data. I perform complete system backups to external hard drives on a regular basis but that doesn’t cover my apartment complex burning down. No for real data integrity you need a copy of your data offsite. To that extent I perform a nightly backup of my most important data to Amazon S3.

When accessing your Amazon S3 storage there are two keys you need. The first is the access key and the second is the secret key. Well a little over a month ago Amazon changed my access key meaning that if I lost my configuration file for my backup software I’d be boned as I could no longer generate or view the secret key for my previous access key.

This of course irritated me as I had to re-upload all my data using the new key to ensure long term survivability of my backup. Well Amazon just released a feature allow you to rotate access keys and most importantly view all your previous keys and their accompanying secret key. Yup that’s a great feature, sure would have loved to have that about a month ago.