Asset backups

[timkelty]

Provide asset backups to compliment db backups.

[andrewfairlie]

This is a great thing for peace of mind, as much for disaster recovery as human error.

A full backup is useful because clients could feasibly download and keep a copy safe for their own records. Perhaps that could be done on demand to keep costs down and as a day to day thing S3 versioning might be a good alternative to full backups where you could restore individual files accidentally removed.

However implemented, it will make it just a bit more comfortable to use.

[jamesmacwhite]

Asset backups are often overlooked so it is a worthy area to discuss, S3 versioning is a potentially more sustainable option to prevent data loss. The issue I've always found with PaaS options that leverage S3 is the filesystem layer is often behind one or more layers of abstraction, meaning direct access via AWS CLI is usually not possible or requires plugins and additional provider specific code, the cool thing with Craft Cloud is the filesystem layer while still does have some abstraction you have a Yii module that's bootstrapped to your app anyway, is mostly transparent and does local fallback natively, adds benefits (native image transforms) and still lets you ultimately use AWS CLI to do anything (within permissions of the access keys) which is all awesome. The downside is that those access keys have very short life and there's no long-term programmatic access keys or accessing an S3 bucket on Craft Cloud through temporary keys that can be generated via an API.

Long story short, if asset backups isn't implemented natively, then #4 should be something that we can then do our own dev ops with, if we wanted to snapshot the asset storage of an environment and store this outside of Craft Cloud, similar to redundant database backups being possible by connecting to RDS and then writing these to an S3 bucket that is outside of Craft Cloud.

Of course, natively having it in the Craft Console UI would be nice. I guess the only consideration on long term programmatic access or indeed asset backups is potential costs of pulling significant amounts of data or writing data regularly and the costs per GB associated, as this is AWS after all, it's not cheap sometimes. S3 can become a monster once you go into large storage and transfers.