I think it's best if you first watched the video tutorial here: https://www.akeeba.com/videos/1212-akeeba-backup/1628-abtp07-remote-backup-amazon-s3.html It takes you through the process step by step.
Please remember that Joomla's Media Manager and Akeeba Backup have nothing to do with each other. In fact, Media Manager is only designed to handle publicly accessible static content such as images, videos, sound files, PDFs, etc. You do NOT want your backups to be publicly accessible! You want them to be private. Moreover, backups are not relatively small media files; they are very big archives. That's why we need a completely different kind of integration in our software, and cannot use Joomla's media manager filesystem drivers.
Also remember that the backup archive is created on your site, then it is uploaded to the remote storage (e.g. Amazon S3). Remote storage providers like Amazon S3 offer cheap, slow, high latency storage. When creating a backup archive you need to be able to write small chunks of data, and read from the archive. The average latency for doing that with S3 is about 1 second. The average latency doing that on a local SSD, on properly configured server with enough memory to have relatively big in-memory filesystem buffering and a fairly fast SSD or SAN is about 10 microseconds or 0.00001 seconds. On a blank Joomla site we are talking about approximately 10,000 of these operations. The difference between 10,000 seconds of accumulated latency and 0.01 seconds of accumulated latency over the course of a backup is the difference between a backup that takes 3 and half hours, and a backup that takes 30 seconds. Uploading the backup of that same, nearly-blank site to S3 after it's done only requires 3 of those write operations and adds just 20 seconds to the backup time.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
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