Importing S3 Disks

Amazon S3 buckets have long been leveraged by Buurst's SoftNAS to provide affordable and easy to manage storage. These buckets of data are resilient, and can survive the failure of a hosting service, such as SoftNAS. Should your existing instance be compromised, SoftNAS makes it easy to recover your S3 bucket by allowing you to retrieve it by importing it to a new instance. This solution limits downtime, and allows you to recover mission critical data quickly and easily.

To access SoftNAS' import S3 functionality, first create a new SoftNAS VM to serve as host to the imported data.
Record the name, bucket information etc, from your previous SoftNAS (or other) instance. If your previous instance cannot be opened, this can be retrieved from the AWS console, under S3.

Login to the SoftNAS instance, using the default credentials (unless you have already changed them).
Once logged in, go to the Storage Administration pane and select Disk Devices.

Once in Disk Devices, select Import Disk. Click Next on opening frame of the Import Disk Device wizard.

Here you can retrieve your S3 bucket by providing the required information.

1. AWS Access and Secret key
2. Device Name - once AWS credentials have been entered, the device names available to that account will be listed. Select the desired device.
3. Bucket Name
4. Region
5. NFS/CIFS if applicable.

The size specified in the SoftNAS UI must match the size of the object storage disk being imported.

Click Import when done.

If there is an error regarding GPT, click ok and run the wizard again. Then, SSH into the SoftNAS instance, and run this command:

'sudo /var/www/softnas/scripts/s3disk.sh remount s3-X'

In the SoftNAS UI, the pools and vols imported from the S3 disk are now visible.