Back up to Amazon Simple Storage Service

You can use the ontape utility to back up and restore data to or from the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). You are responsible for terms and any charges associated with your use of the Amazon Simple Storage Service.

Before you begin

Prerequisites:

You must have an Amazon account to perform cloud storage backups. See the Amazon website for instructions about setting up an account.
Java™ version 1.5 or later is required.
Backup objects must be 5 GB or smaller.

About this task

The following steps show how to back up data to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) System and restore from it by using ontape backup and restore utility. In this context, cloud storage refers to an online storage service over the Internet. If you choose to back up to cloud storage, you do not need to provide tapes. Instead, you back up the data to a virtual device, most likely located on the Internet.

Procedure

Configure the online storage device.
1. Using a web browser, navigate to the Amazon S3 website and log on.
2. Obtain an access key ID and a secret access key.
3. Store the access credentials in a file. Set the permissions on the file to allow access only to user executing the ontape utility.
  - On UNIX™ systems, store the values in the file: $INFORMIXDIR/etc/ifxbkpcloud.credentials
  - On Windows™ systems, store the values in: %INFORMIXDIR%\etc\ifxbkpcloud.credentials
  The file must have the following format:
```
secretKey=secret_access_key
accessKey=access_key_ID
```
4. Use the ifxbkpcloud.jar utility to create and name a storage device in the region where you intend to store data. Amazon uses the term bucket to describe the container for backup data. The storage device name you choose has the same restrictions as those for the bucket name in Amazon S3 and must be unique.
  For example, the following command creates a storage device named mytapedevice at a US Standard region on Amazon S3. Run the command from the $INFORMIXDIR/bin directory on UNIX systems, or from %INFORMIXDIR%\bin on Windows systems.
```
java -jar ifxbkpcloud.jar CREATE_DEVICE amazon mytapedevice US_Standard
```

Set the TAPEDEV and LTAPEDEV configuration parameters in the onconfig file to point to the cloud storage location. For example:

TAPEDEV '/opt/IBM/informix/tapedev_dir, keep = yes, cloud = amazon,
        url = https://mytapedevice.s3.amazonaws.com'
LTAPEDEV '/opt/IBM/informix/ltapedev_dir, keep = yes, cloud = amazon, 
        url = https://mylogdevice.s3.amazonaws.com'

Back up data to the online storage device by using the ontape utility.
```
ontape -s -L 0
```
You can restore data from the cloud storage by using the following command:
```
ontape -r
```
You should use https secure data transmission when transferring data to cloud storage. You should encrypt data before transferring data to a cloud image. To encrypt data, use the BACKUP_FILTER and RESTORE_FILTER configuration parameters to call an external encryption program. The archecker utility does not support table-level restore of data from cloud storage.