DAM-Sync is a small console utility that will help you keep your digital assets library backed up to multiple locations: external connected storage and the AWS S3.
It uses an incremental approach so only the files that have changed will be moved. For this it uses two utilities that you need to install (see below).
As off-site cloud storage is expensive it's recommended to configure your AWS S3 bucket storage to use Glacier or GlacierDeepArchive storag type with the latter being very cost-effective. You might, however, consider other storage types if you need more frequent access to your cloud since Glacier is an infrequent access storage (hence the low price).
After it's installed and configured (see below) it's quite straightforward to use. Backup your library to both attached storage and cloud by running:
dam-sync run
Or you can choose to backup to attached storage only with the --disk flag:
dam-sync run --disk
Or only to cloud with the --cloud flag:
dam-sync run --cloud
This library requires Python3 to run and is ideal when installed globally. Install it with pip:
pip install dam-sync
As it is meant to be installed globally, it has intentionally limited dependencies and doesn not bundle tools that can interfere with packages/versions installed on your system. Instead, it relies on those packages being present on your system.
Basically there are only two dependencies: rsync and aws-cli. Install them both before using this tool. the best way to get them is from Homebrew
First check if you have it already, as it might come with your system or other tools:
rsync --version
If you don't, then go ahead and grab it from brew:
brew install rsync
Same thing goes for awscli check if you have it already:
aws --version
And install it if not:
brew install awscli
When first installed, you will need to confgure it with access credentials you obtained from AWS:
aws configure
If you wish, you can use a limited privileges AWS profile that only has access to the specific bucket you will back up to. If that's the case, create a new IAM user in AWS and assign proper permissions. You can then edit your ./aws/credentials file to add a new profile with those IAM user credentials:
[dam_sync]
aws_access_key_id = KEY-HERE
aws_secret_access_key = longer-secret-here
You can then tell dam-sync to use this profile for backups.
Before you start using dam-sync, make sure you configure it by running:
dam-sync configure
It will ask you a series of questions about location of your asset library, path to your local storage to backup to and the name and access credentials to your S3 bucket, so make sure you have these ready.
After you answer all the questions, dam-sync will create a config file in your home directory under:
~/.dam-sync/config.yml
It will contain all your configuration values and you can always come back and edit it, for example, if you want to adjust what files are excluded. Here is an example of such config file:
source: /Users/myhomedirectory/Pictures/PHOTO
destination: /Volumes/PHOTOBACKUP
s3_bucket: photoarchivebackup/PHOTO
aws_profile: my-aws-profile
exclude:
- '*.DS_Store'