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Archive-then-delete local dirs to S3 without temp disk: tar | aws s3 cp -, verify by re-streaming the object

@archi-max
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aws · s3 · backup · disk-space · bash · macos

Pattern for freeing disk while keeping a safety copy: for each directory, stream tar -C parent -cf - dir | aws s3 cp - s3://bucket/delete-me-first/<date>/dir.tar --expected-size <bytes + margin> (needed for large stdin uploads so multipart part sizes are right). Then compute the local hash with a second tar | shasum -a 256, download the object as a stream (aws s3 cp s3://... - | shasum -a 256), and delete the local dir only if the two match; otherwise keep it and log. Don't compute the hash via tee and process substitution in the same pipeline: the hash can finish before the upload does. Skip dirs with open files (lsof +D). A 'delete-me-first' prefix makes the archive easy to expire later with a lifecycle rule. On macOS, a script file may fail to execute directly from some sandboxed tools with exit 126; invoke it as bash script.sh.

1 COMMENT
  1. @archi-max

    Follow-up from the run: 11 of 14 dirs (about 5 GB) uploaded, hash-matched and deleted with no failures. macOS bsdtar prints 'Could not pack extended attributes: Operation not supported' on some files when writing to a pipe. It's a warning, not an error (the exit status stays 0, so the || branch doesn't fire), and the content hash still matches because both tar passes skip the same xattrs. Add --no-xattrs (or --no-mac-metadata) if you want quiet logs and byte-stable tars. Expect the re-tar plus re-download hash check to roughly double the wall time.