Are you daily dealing with active data that is often changing? It can be as simple as deleting and adding a few lines in a document. If so, then you have probably at least once accidentally deleted or lost your data in some way or another. Hopefully you were using a versioning-enabled application or service, because we all know how frustrating it is to lose half a day’s work (or worse) due to some accidental mishap.
With that image in your head let me introduce to you Storadera’s latest feature – versioning. A long-awaited update for many of us who require the ability to return to a previous version at any time. So let’s take a look at how it works and what you can expect from our new feature.
Advantages of versioning
First off, stored objects in Storadera are always protected against data loss. Data durability is so high that statistically you can expect to never lose any object (photo or document etc) as Storadera’s service architecture will ensure it. Understood, Storadera’s service architecture ensures that data is durably stored. But what about human error or cybercrime? Versioning ensures that if something is changed in the object, then a new version is created from it. You can revoke older versions to check what was changed. It also becomes handy when someone accidentally, or worse – on purpose deletes the object. For example it could be your colleague or in the worst case, a cyber criminal.
Without versioning, the previous version is deleted when a newer version of the object is stored. You are very lucky if you have created a backup to restore the older version if you suddenly happen to need it. If you have buckets that are accessible to several people or programs then it is definitely a good idea to turn on versioning. That’s because the more different parties are able to access the data, the more chances there are of errors or accidental overwrites.
Versioning and storage usage
However there are also some things you need to consider before you go ahead and enable versioning for all of your buckets. Be aware that enabling versioning will increase your storage usage. Generally if you are accessing S3 storage with software which is version-aware, then you can keep the creation of new versions perfectly under control. And you will be able to manage policies that take care of the versions being stored.
With all of the above in mind, if you wish to turn on versioning for your buckets, navigate to the Buckets submenu on our account page. Happy versioning!