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Changing the S3 bucket region with Déjà Dup

Déjà Dup is a simplified back-up tool for Gnome that lets you use a variety of storage options for backing up your computer. However, its handling of Amazon S3 is a little simplistic as it does not let you set the region of the bucket that it will automatically create for you or use a pre-existing bucket. Amazon charges based on where data is sent and got from, so if you do not live in the US Déjà Dup will cost you extra. There is a bug report of course, but that does not seem to be getting attention, so below are instructions for a work around.

I have not tested the instructions exhaustively, but it works for me on Fedora 16 Beta with Déjà Dup version 19.90, having initially let Déjà Dup create a default bucket. They are based on an answer to a different problem. Essentially the fix is to manually specify the bucket used in the dconf data for Déjà Dup, after which it just magically carries on working.

  • Using an S3 tool…
    1. Create a bucket with the correct region specified
    2. If applicable, copy the contents from the default Déjà Dup bucket into the new one
  • On your computer…
    1. You will need to use the dconf tool, which is probably already installed
    2. $ dconf write /org/gnome/deja-dup/s3/bucket \'bucket-name\'
    3. Also, you may want to change or reset the folder key, $ dconf reset /org/gnome/deja-dup/s3/folder

Note that the escaped quote marks are required but I have no idea why. If you are not comfortable putting magic incantations into the terminal there is a GUI editor for dconf which you should be able to find in a package with a name like dconf-editor, or dconf-tools.

Posted on 13 Oct 2011

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2014 Craig Loftus
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Last updated
2019-07-19