Restoring versions and objects

You can use Point-in-time Restore and S3 pit restore when multiple files and larger directory trees need to be restored from versioned buckets.

Point-in-time Restore

The S3 Versioning and the Amazon EventBridge can restore individual objects or large datasets. This solution provides a complete bucket inventory and determines object changes from the specified timestamp, the snapshot can be restored into the same or a different bucket. For more information about the process and enablement of point-in-time restore, see Point-in-time restore for Amazon S3 buckets.

S3 pit restore Tool

The S3 pit restore Tool can restore previous versions of the data stored in S3 when S3 versioning is enabled. You can restore some or all of the files to a certain point in time to a local file system, the same S3 bucket, or a different S3 bucket. For more information, see the S3 pit restore documentation.

Comparison of Point-in-time Restore and S3 pit restore

Both Point-in-time Restore and S3 pit restore can be used to restore directories/prefixes to a previous version when S3 versioning is enabled. The Point-in-time Restore can also provide audit/event logs to show changes in S3, which give a more detailed view of the performed operations. However, the Point-in-time Restore can only restore changed objects and relies on other AWS services and requires more steps. The dependency on other AWS services also affects the pricing calculation for Point-in-time Restore. For more information, see Point-in-time restore for Amazon S3 buckets and the AWS S3 Pricing page. While the S3 pit restore Tool has no additional cost, the maintainability of the tool is not certain and requires users to configure their own access, secret key, and region. Furthermore, Delegation Tokens will not work.