Laravel Package to Backup Files to Amazon S3

Many years ago, before cloud servers existed, I worked for an ISP. We were running Linux servers and we had way more problems with them than one would think possible. It seemed like every other month the servers would crash and we would lost most of the data on them. Back then we had a tape backup system, which seemed almost as failure prone as the servers, so when the crashes happened there was rarely any recoverable data.

As a result of that experience I am meticulous about always having my important data backed up. All my code is either on GitHub or BitBucket, so the only thing that exists only on my servers is my databases. A couple of months ago I decided I needed to have that data backed up regularly and after considering a few options I decided to back it up to Amazon S3. I wrote a two piece solution consisting of:

1. A shell script to dump the databases to files, and then executes...
2. A Laravel command to upload the dump to my S3 bucket.

Since the PHP part was a command I could just call it from my shell script and schedule that as a cron job. Yesterday I decided to turn the Laravel piece of that into a package called escuccim/s3backup. The code was originally written specifically to upload my DB dumps to S3 and had most parameters hard-coded in, so I added a few options to the command and updated my shell script to pass them in.

The package currently only works for a single file at a time, as that is all I need it to do, but I may add support for directories at some point in the future. The package is available through packagist although to use it you currently need to specify version dev-master.