S3-DR (S3 Disaster Recovery) is a free backup client that stores encrypted, incremental backups of local files and NAS shares cost-optimized on AWS S3.

Amazon S3 is a price-competitive, salable, and effective solution for storing your backups, but how are you going to get your backups there? The S3 Disaster Recovery Tool may be your answer – and it’s free!

Rather than trying to come up with a generic tool that tries to solve every problem, the S3 Disaster Recovery Tool is specifically optimized for disaster recovery workflows. For disaster recovery, the most common task is to perform a backup, and restores are only required if things go horribly south. By optimizing workflows for true disaster recovery, we’re able to make optimizations to significantly reduce the cost of your S3-based backups. Here are some examples of how S3-DR is specifically optimized for Disaster Recovery Workflows:

1. To reduce the number of AWS S3 calls that have to be made, small files are bundled together. PUT requests are among the most expensive S3 requests, and our dynamic bundle sizing algorithm is designed to save you money.
2. To minimize how much data has to be backed up on each backup iteration (consuming local resources, internet bandwidth, and costing more money on S3), all backups performed are incremental. If we’ve already backed it up and it hasn’t changed, we won’t back it up again.
3. To minimize the size of your backups (and your S3 bill), all data is compressed. While not all files are compressible (Example: Mp3’s and videos are usually already compressed), the overhead to do the compression is insignificant considering the internet pipe most people have to AWS.
4. We perform cryptographic checksums to ensure data isn’t corrupted in transmission to provide the highest level of confidence that your data is protected.
5. Data is stored on the infrequent access storage class, whereas metadata is stored on the standard S3 storage class. This allows metadata to be accessed frequently without incurring additional fees, while minimizing the fees for storing your backup data. Since your backup data is >99% of all data consumed, this can result in a cost savings of >50%.
6. The S3 Disaster Recovery Tool is distributed as a self-executing JAR CLI with a configuration GUI for ease of use. This makes integrating the tool with Unix cron, Windows task scheduler, or other scripts easy. See the documentation section for details. You can be up and running in just a few minutes!