Backing Up Perforce Depot to Amazon S3

You can help secure your Perforce depot content by backing it up, and then exporting it to a selected Amazon S3 server. This process maintains the depot structure while also storing your data.

Note: Exporting your data may take up to a few hours depending on your Perforce depot size. When cloning the instance, the depot is locked for a few minutes, but then the depot is again available. Consider running this process when no users are accessing your Perforce depot.

Only one backup process may be in progress for each Perforce depot and the status displays accordingly when a user visits while a backup is processing. If a user attempts to start another backup while one is running, a warning message appears and prevents the user from continuing with the additional backup procedure.

You may cancel a backup process while it is running by simply clicking the Cancel backup button and confirming that you want to halt the current backup process.

IMPORTANT: Attention! When started (even if canceled), you cannot run another backup for this depot in the next 48 hours.

Accounts used to run this feature must have space owner and portfolio manager permissions. Before starting a backup, make sure you have an Access key and Secret key for your AWS account root user. See the process below if you need to create an access key.

To back up your Perforce depot

Navigate to Your Space > Perforce Depot > Backups tab.
Complete the fields, and then click Start backup. While the backup is processing, status messages appear letting users know where in the process the backup is at any time.

When the backup is complete, the system sends an email notification to the address associated with the user account creating the backup.

If a backup fails, an error message appears indicating which step failed to complete. Try the backup again, verifying any information you entered before starting the backup process.

Creating an Amazon S3 bucket

One of the first steps when storing your data in Amazon S3 is to create a bucket to contain your objects.

To create an Amazon S3 Bucket

Log in to the preview version of the AWS Management Console.
Under Storage & Content Delivery, select S3 to open the Amazon S3 console.
From the Amazon S3 console dashboard, choose Create Bucket.
In Create a Bucket, type a name in Bucket Name.
In Region, choose preferred option.
Choose Create.
When Amazon S3 successfully creates your bucket, the console displays your empty bucket in the Buckets pane.

Getting your AWS access key ID and secret access key

Access to Amazon AWS includes an access key ID and a secret access key. Both of these identifiers are necessary when authenticating your requests.

To get your access key ID and secret access key

Open the AWS IAM console.
On the navigation menu, select Users.
Choose your IAM user name (not the check box).
Open the Security credentials tab, and then choose Create access key.
Click Show to see the new access key. Your credentials should look similar to the following example:
- Access key ID: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
- Secret access key: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
Click Download .csv file to download the key pair. Be sure to store the .csv file along with the keys in a secure location.