Category Archives: Cloud

How to download an entire S3 bucket recursively

Amazon S3 bucket
Image:  Amazon Web Services, Inc. ©

Sometimes I have the need to keep a local copy of an S3 bucket. Using the AWS console is ok if you just have few objects in the S3 bucket. But what do you do if you have hundreds of objects in your S3 bucket? The aws cli comes to rescue with this simple command:

aws s3 cp --recursive s3://my_s3_bucket .

The recursive flag downloads the entire S3 bucket recursively into the local directory (that’s what the dot at the end is for). The operation may take some time depending on the number of objects stored in the S3 bucket so be patient!