aws-glacier-multipart-upload

Script for uploading large files to AWS Glacier

Helpful AWS Glacier pages:

• Using Amazon Glacier with the AWS Command Line Interface
• AWS Glacier Command Reference

Running scripts in parallel:

• GNU Parallel Tutorial

Motivation

The one-liner upload-archive isn't recommend for files over 100 MB, and you should instead use upload-multipart. The difficult part of using using multiupload is that it is really three major commands, with the second needing to repeated for every file to upload, and a custom byte range needs to be defined for each file chunk that is being uploaded. For example, with a 4MB file (4194304 bytes) the first three files need the following argument. This is repeated 1945 times for my 8GB file.

• aws glacier upload-multipart-part --body partaa --range 'bytes 0-4194303/*' --account-id - --vault-name media1 --upload-id [your upload id here]
• aws glacier upload-multipart-part --body partab --range 'bytes 4194304-8388607/*' --account-id - --vault-name media1 --upload-id [your upload id here]
• aws glacier upload-multipart-part --body partac --range 'bytes 8388608-12582911/*' --account-id - --vault-name media1 --upload-id [your upload id here]
• 1941 commands later...
• aws glacier upload-multipart-part --body partzbxu --range 'bytes 8153726976-8157921279/*' --account-id - --vault-name media1 --upload-id [your upload id here]

We need a script to handle the math and autogenerate the code.

This script leverages the parallel library, so my 1945 upload scripts are kicked off in parallel, but are queued up until a core is done with one before proceeding to the next. There is even a progress bar built in that shows you what percent is complete, and an estimated wait time until it is done.

Prerequisites

All of the following items in the Prerequisites section only need to be done once to set things up.

This script depends on jq for dealing with json and parallel for submitting the upload commands in parallel. If you are using Fed/CentOS/RHEL, then run the following:

sudo dnf install jq
sudo dnf install parallel

It assumes you have an AWS account, and have signed up for the glacier service. In this example, I have already created the vault named media1 via AWS console.

It also assumes that you have the AWS Command Line Interface installed on your machine. Again, if you are using Fed/CentOS/RHEL, then here is how you would get it:

sudo pip install awscli

Configure your machine to pass credentials automatically. This allows you pass a single dash with the account-id argument.

aws configure

Before jumping into the script, verify that your connection works by describing the vault you have created, which is media1 in my case. Run this describ-vault command and you should see similiar json results.

aws glacier describe-vault --vault-name media1 --account-id -
{
"SizeInBytes": 11360932143, 
"VaultARN": "arn:aws:glacier:us-east-1:<redacted>:vaults/media1", 
"LastInventoryDate": "2015-12-16T01:23:18.678Z", 
"NumberOfArchives": 7, 
"CreationDate": "2015-12-12T02:22:24.956Z", 
"VaultName": "media1"
}

Download the glacierupload.sh script:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/benporter/aws-glacier-multipart-upload/master/glacierupload.sh

Make it executable:

chmod u+x glacierupload.sh

Script Usage

Tar and zip the files you want to upload:

tar -zcvf my-backup.tar.gz /location/to/zip/*

Now chunk out your zipped file into equal peice chunks. You can only pick multiples of 1MB up to 4MB. This example chunks out the my-backup.tar.gz file into 4MB chunks, giving all of them the prefix part which is what the script expects to see. If you choose something other than part, then you'll need to edit the script.

split --bytes=4194304 --verbose my-backup.tar.gz part

Now it is time to run the script. It assumes that your part* files are in the same directory as the script.

./glacierupload.sh