Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of versioning support for their S3 cloud storage product. By using the versioning function, it will help make sure you (or your users) never accidentally remove or update an object. The S3 versioning will allow you to rollback to a safe version if needed. You can also use the versioning option for storage and archiving as you can now just keep writing to the same file name and each new write will create a version.
Amazon notes, “Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.”
The AWS S3 versioning is available for the standard data storage rates. So if you store 2 versions of an image, you will be charged for the storage of both objects. To use versioning, you MUST set the bucket to use it – otherwise it will be the same bucket as you’ve had previously.