s3sync

Overview

s3sync is a reliable, flexible, and fast synchronization tool for S3.

This document is a summary of s3sync. For more detailed information, please refer to the full README.

Who is this for?

s3sync is designed for users who need to synchronize data with S3 or S3-compatible object storage.
This tool is specifically tailored for those who require reliable synchronization capabilities and evidence of data integrity.

If you don't use s3sync for synchronization, you can use s3sync for checking the integrity of objects that have been transferred by other tools, such as AWS CLI, Rclone, s5cmd, and other S3 storage tools.
In general, it is recommended to verify with other tools if you want to ensure that the objects have been transferred correctly.

As a Rust library

s3sync can be used as a Rust library.
s3sync CLI is a very thin wrapper of the s3sync library. You can use all features of s3sync CLI in the library.

See docs.rs for more information.

Features highlights

• Reliable: In-depth end-to-end object integrity check
  s3sync calculates ETag(MD5 or equivalent) for each object and compares them with the ETag in the target.
  An object that exists in the local disk is read from the disk and compared with the checksum in the source or target.
  In the case of S3 to S3, s3sync simply compares ETags that are calculated by S3.
  Optionally, s3sync can also calculate and compare additional checksum(SHA256/SHA1/CRC32/CRC32C/CRC64NVME) for each object.

  s3sync always shows the integrity check result, so you can verify that the synchronization was successful.

  $ s3sync --additional-checksum-algorithm SHA256 test_data s3://xxxxx
  772.00 KiB | 772.00 KiB/sec,  transferred 100 objects | 100 objects/sec,  etag verified 100 objects,  checksum verified 100 objects ...(omitted)
  

  transferred 100 objects | 100 objects/sec, etag verified 100 objects, checksum verified 100 objects means that all objects have been transferred and ETag(MD5 or equivalent) and additional checksum(SHA256 in this case) have been verified successfully.
  If you want to get detailed evidence of the integrity check, you can use Sync statistics report feature(see below).

• Multiple ways

  • Local to S3(S3-compatible storage)
  • S3(S3-compatible storage) to Local
  • S3 to S3(cross-region, same-region, same-account, cross-account, from-to S3/S3-compatible storage)

• Flexible filtering

  • Key, ContentType, user-defined metadata and tagging by regular expression.
  • Size and modified time
  • Custom filtering with a Lua script or User-defined callback function (Rust)

• Incremental transfer
  There are many ways to transfer objects:

  • Modified time based (default)
  • Size-based
  • ETag(MD5 or equivalent) based
  • Additional checksum(SHA256/SHA1/CRC32/CRC32C/CRC64NVME) based

• Easy to use
  s3sync is designed to be easy to use.
  s3sync has over 100 command line options, this is because there are many use cases.
  But the default settings are reasonable for most cases of reliable synchronization.

  For example, In an IAM role environment, the following command will transfer all objects from the local directory to the S3 bucket and verify the integrity of the transferred objects using ETag(MD5 or equivalent).
  If something goes wrong, s3sync will display a warning or error message to help you understand the issue.

  s3sync /path/to/local s3://bucket-name/prefix
  

• Fast
  s3sync is implemented in Rust and uses the AWS SDK for Rust, which supports multithreaded asynchronous I/O.
  In my environment(s3sync 1.45.0(glibc)/c7a.xlarge(4vCPU, 8GB)/200GB IOPS SSD(io 1), with 160 workers), uploading from local to S3 achieved about 4,300 objects/sec (small objects 10KiB),
  in the case of a large objects(6GiB object, total 96GiB, --max-parallel-uploads 48), about 256.72 MiB/sec, 6.5 minutes,

• Versioning support
  All versions of the object can be synchronized. (Except intermediate delete markers)

• Point-in-time snapshot
  With a versioning-enabled S3 bucket, you can transfer objects at a specific point in time.

• Lua scripting support
  You can use a Lua (5.4) script to implement custom filtering, event handling, preprocessing before transferring objects to S3.
  --preprocess-callback-lua-script, --event-callback-lua-script, --filter-callback-lua-script options are available for this purpose.
  Lua is widely recognized as a fast scripting language. The Lua engine is embedded in s3sync, so you can use Lua script without any additional dependencies.
  For example, you can use Lua script to implement custom preprocessing logic, such as dynamically modifying the object attributes(e.g., metadata, tagging) before transferring it to S3.
  By default, Lua scripts run in safe mode, so they cannot use Lua’s OS or I/O library functions.
  If you want to allow more Lua libraries, you can use --allow-lua-os-library, --allow-lua-unsafe-vm option.
  See Lua script example

  Note: --preprocess-callback-lua-script can not modify the object's key or content itself.

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone support
  s3sync can be used with Amazon S3 Express one Zone.

• Sync statistics report
  s3sync can check and report the synchronization status at any time.
  Sync statistics report feature supports objects that any tools have transferred, such as AWS CLI, Rclone, s5cmd, and other S3 storage tools.
  And s3sync supports multipart upload and guesses chunk size automatically and verifies the integrity of the uploaded objects. (--auto-chunksize option).
  --auto-chunksize option is useful for S3 compatible storage that does not support additional checksum.

  For example, If you want to know all the objects transferred by AWS CLI(of course, you can use s3sync) have been transferred correctly(checksum based), the following command will show the report.

  aws s3 sync test_data s3://xxxx/
  s3sync --check-additional-checksum CRC64NVME --json-tracing --report-sync-status test_data s3://xxxx/ |tail -2 |jq
  

  The following is an example of the report (the last two lines of the above command).

  Click to expand to view report

  {
    "timestamp": "2025-07-17T22:41:51.457601Z",
    "level": "INFO",
    "fields": {
      "name": "SYNC_STATUS",
      "type": "CHECKSUM",
      "status": "MATCHES",
      "key": "dir7/data4.dat",
      "checksum_algorithm": "CRC64NVME",
      "source_checksum": "YE4jTLSB/cA=",
      "target_checksum": "YE4jTLSB/cA=",
      "source_version_id": "",
      "target_version_id": "",
      "source_last_modified": "2025-06-14T03:52:21.843+00:00",
      "target_last_modified": "2025-07-17T22:40:51+00:00",
      "source_size": 22020096,
      "target_size": 22020096
    }
  }
  {
    "timestamp": "2025-07-17T22:41:51.473349Z",
    "level": "INFO",
    "fields": {
      "name": "REPORT_SUMMARY",
      "number_of_objects": 40,
      "etag_matches": 0,
      "checksum_matches": 40,
      "metadata_matches": 0,
      "tagging_matches": 0,
      "not_found": 0,
      "etag_mismatch": 0,
      "checksum_mismatch": 0,
      "metadata_mismatch": 0,
      "tagging_mismatch": 0,
      "etag_unknown": 0,
      "checksum_unknown": 0
    }
  }
  

  You can check the synchronization status of the object's tagging and metadata with --report-metadata-sync-status and --report-tagging-sync-status option.

• Robust retry logic
  For long-time running operations, s3sync has a robust original retry logic in addition to AWS SDK's retry logic.

• CI/CD friendly
  s3sync is designed to be used in CI/CD pipelines.

  • JSON tracing(logging) support(--json-tracing option)
  • Explicit exit code
    0 for success, 1 for error, 2 for invalid arguments, 3 for warnings(e.g., ETag mismatch), 101 for abnormal termination (e.g., Rust panic, it's a bug of s3sync)
  • Supports all options via environment variables

• Multiple platforms support
  On Linux(x86_64, aarch64), macOS(aarch64) and Windows(x86_64, aarch64) are fully tested and supported.
  s3sync is distributed as a single binary with no dependencies, so it can be easily run on the above platforms.
  Linux musl statically linked binary is also available.

About testing

Supported target: Amazon S3 only.

Support for S3-compatible storage is on a best-effort basis and may behave differently.
s3sync has been tested with Amazon S3. s3sync has many end-to-end tests and unit tests and runs every time when a new version is released.
S3-compatible storage is not tested when a new version is released (I test only when making major changes).
This is because S3-compatible storage may have different behaviors and features.
Since there is no official certification for S3-compatible storage, comprehensive testing is not possible.

More information

For more information, please refer to the full README

Contributing

While this project began as a personal hobby, it has been built with careful attention to production-quality standards.

• Suggestions and bug reports are welcome, but responses are not guaranteed.
• Pull requests for new features are generally not accepted, as they may conflict with the design philosophy.
• If you find this project useful, feel free to fork and modify it as you wish.

🔒 I consider this project to be “complete” and will maintain it only minimally going forward.
However, I intend to keep the AWS SDK for Rust and other dependencies up to date regularly.