Amazon have just announced their support for automatic versioning control for all files managed by Amazon’s S3 file storage service. For me, this was one of the missing jigsaw pieces of S3 – a hole filled by a number of suppliers who now are going to have to fight very hard to keep that part of the business model going.
Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects any time you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request….
…Versioning offers an additional level of protection by providing a means of recovery when customers accidentally overwrite or delete objects. This allows you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving.
To get developers up and running with the new versioning server, the Amazon AWS team are running a ‘Introduction to Versioning Support for Amazon S3‘ webinar, which is free to attend.