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If you’ve been using N2W for a while, you’re probably familiar with our S3 Bucket Sync feature. It’s a reliable way to replicate static data by copying objects from a source bucket to a destination bucket so you always have a second copy somewhere else. It’s essentially a smart copy-paste between two locations and it’s still fully supported, still in the UI, and still great for what it was designed to do: keep your data highly available.
Point-in-time backup and syncing are two different things. Before we dive into Point-In-Time S3 backup, let’s take a look at one of our older—but still incredibly useful—sync feature.
Reviewing S3 Bucket Sync
With S3 Bucket Sync, both buckets always reflect the same current state. It’s an excellent solution for high availability and redundancy. By continuously syncing your latest bucket to another location, your data stays accessible even if one region experiences an outage, keeping your operations running without interruption.
The S3 Bucket Sync feature prompts you to select a source bucket and a destination bucket. N2W then copies the entire contents of the source bucket to the destination bucket, creating an up-to-date replica of your data.
We recommend choosing a destination bucket in a different AWS region. If an entire region becomes unavailable, all buckets in that region become inaccessible, regardless of how many copies you maintain there. By replicating data across regions, you add an extra layer of resilience.
The destination bucket can also reside in a different AWS account. Unlike AWS Backup, N2W does not require the target account to be part of the same AWS Organization. AWS Backup’s cross-account capabilities are limited to accounts within an organization for certain operations. N2W, on the other hand, allows you to replicate data to any AWS account, including completely standalone accounts, giving you greater flexibility and stronger isolation for backup and recovery scenarios.
However, if a file gets corrupted or accidentally deleted, you aren’t able to recover from a previous version of your bucket.
S3 Bucket Sync vs. PIT Backup: Two Tools for a Complete Data Protection Strategy
N2W has introduced S3 Bucket Backup, which takes a different approach. It captures a snapshot of your bucket at a specific point in time. That means if you took a backup at 5am and something went wrong at noon, you can restore exactly to what your bucket looked like at 5am, along with files, object tags, and access control lists (ACLs).
Together, these two features cover the full spectrum of data protection: Sync keeps you up and running during infrastructure disruptions, while point-in-time backup lets you roll back to a known good state when data itself is compromised. N2W also adds flexibility with seamless Cross-Region & Cross-Account options for your S3 buckets.
Both features coexist in the N2W interface, giving you the freedom to use either, or both, as your recovery strategy demands.
Getting Started with Point-In-Time S3 Bucket Backup: The Prerequisites
There are a few things you’ll need to have in place on the AWS side before S3 Bucket Backup will work:
- S3 versioning must be enabled on the bucket you want to back up. AWS relies on versioning to capture point-in-time snapshots.
- Opt in to S3 in AWS Backup. Head to the AWS console and explicitly enable the S3 service. This needs to be done per region — if you skip this step, you’ll see an error when the backup runs.
- For the full list of AWS prerequisites, see AWS’s official dev guide for S3 backups.
Setting It Up in N2W
Once your AWS environment is ready, adding S3 backup to a policy is straightforward. Navigate to the Backup Targets tab when creating or editing a policy, and add your S3 bucket as a target.
When you click Configure, you’ll be asked to choose:
- Backup Vault — the AWS Backup vault where your snapshots will be stored.
- IAM Role — make sure the role has the necessary permissions for S3 backup and restore operations. AWS provides specific guidance on the required role policies, and N2W surfaces this during configuration.
- Expiration — this is where you decide how long to keep your backups. Choose between expiration by policy or by a specific retention window. If you’re taking daily backups and never cleaning them up, storage costs will climb. Setting a retention policy ensures older snapshots are automatically deleted, keeping things tidy and cost-effective.
If Disaster Recovery is enabled in your account, you’ll also configure the Backup Vault and IAM Role for the DR copy.
What Gets Backed Up?
When N2W backs up your S3 bucket, it captures more than just the objects themselves. Your object tags and access control lists (ACLs) are included in the backup, so when you restore, your permissions and metadata come back with it, not just the raw data.
Why Not Just Use AWS Backup Directly?
AWS Backup is the engine under the hood here, but configuring and managing it natively means working in yet another console, building policies in isolation, and not having bullet-proof resiliency due to limited RTO and lack of cross-region and cross-account backup.
If you’re already managing EC2 instances, RDS databases, EFS volumes, and more through N2W, adding S3 buckets as backup targets inside the same policy is a significant operational advantage. With N2W, your S3 buckets sit alongside all your other AWS resources under a single pane of glass. When something goes wrong, recovery is immediate and handled from the same place you manage everything else, whether you need to recover from your native backup account, or from another region or disaster recovery account.
This is S3 protection that actually fits into how your team already works. Be sure to try S3 Bucket Backup today.