Copying Files To & From an AWS S3 Bucket

Recently I needed to download an entire bucket worth of data for an offsite backup. Easy right? Go to the Amazon Web Services Console and hit download! WRONG.

You can download individual files but not an entire bucket. Seems silly. Luckily there is an easy way to do it via the Amazon Web Services CLI. Enter simple commands:

$ aws s3 cp s3://YOUR_BUCKET/ /LOCAL_DIRECTORY --recursive

Let’s dissect this just a little bit. The first couple of options in the command should be pretty self-explanatory. We are going to use the AWS CLI, we chose S3 as our service and then the ‘cp’ means we are going to copy. Now, there are a bunch of other options that you can do here. I suggest taking a look at the documentation here to learn more. After that, you simply add in your bucket name, note the trailing forward slash, then where you want to put your files on your local machine. Finally, I added the --recursive flag so that it would read through all the lower directories.

Ultimately a very simple solution to transfer some data quickly! The AWS S3 CLI functions very similarly to that of your standard directory functions. So, feel free to poke around and see what it can do!