S3 Versioning

• Versioning is a means of keeping multiple variants of an object in the same bucket.

• You can use versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your S3 bucket.

• With versioning, you can easily recover from both unintended user actions and application failures.

• When you enable versioning for a bucket, if S3 receives multiple write requests for the same object simultaneously, it stores all of the objects.

• If you enable versioning for a bucket, S3 automatically generates a unique version ID for the object being stored. In one bucket, for example, you can have two objects with the same key, but different version IDs, such as photo.gif (version 111111) and photo.gif (version 121212).

• Buckets can be in one of three states:

  • Unversioned (the default).

  • Versioning-enabled.

  • Versioning-suspended.

• Once you version-enable a bucket, it can never return to an unversioned state. However, you can suspend versioning on that bucket.

• The versioning state applies to all (never some) of the objects in that bucket.