How do I migrate a bucket to another region?

While there is no direct way to migrate that service the way you can a compute instance, it is possible to move your data to a new bucket in another region. We have another post that addresses this, but I wanted to add some additional information you might find helpful.

Specifically, I found using the Cyberduck GUI to be the easiest way to do this. To get started, you can follow the instructions to setup and install Cyberduck using this guide.

A few notes about using that guide.

• First, that guide asks you to "select Cyberduck > Preferences" from the menu bar, but on my Macbook, when I click Cyberduck from the top left corner of my screen (where the menu bar is for Macs), I don't see a Preferences option. When I click Settings, I am taken to the same Preferences page shown in the image of our guide.

• Second, if you're already a Cyberduck user, you'll likely be able to skip at least some of those steps. But if you've been using Object Storage for a while, you may only see four data centers in your options when you try to open connections in Cyberduck. If you intend to move to a newer data center with more Object Storage availability, you will need to follow those steps to add connection profiles for the new Data Centers that didn't exist when you first configured Cyberduck. While they aren't listed in the guide, I've confirmed Washington, Paris, and Chicago are all available as options through Cyberduck.

Next Steps

• Once you have Cyberduck ready to go, you can then create a new bucket in the region you'd like to move to.

• Next, open a connection to the data center your current bucket is in using the open connection button at the top of the Cyberduck interface.

• Then click file in the top left of your screen next to where it says "Cyberduck" then choose new browser. (Again, I'm doing this on a Macbook, but I'm hoping that other operating systems aren't too different).

• You can then set up a second connection to the region you created the new bucket in by following the same steps.

• Once the two screens are side-by-side, you can just drag anything from one to the other.

Because I'm used to s3cmd, I was a little worried about trying this when a customer asked about it a few months ago, but it ended up being an extremely user-friendly migration option and I strongly recommend it, especially for anyone who doesn't like using the command line.

Additional Considerations

Possible Limitations When I tested this, it was for the purpose making sure this was an option, and I didn't have a lot to transfer. It's possible there are some limitations here I'm not aware of when moving large files holding a lot of data or moving a large number of files. That said, I recommend looking into it to see if it works for you. If you need to make any changes to your configuration, going to Cyberduck>Settings may provide options that could help depending on what your needs are.

Network Transfer Costs
I also wanted to recommend checking our our Object Storage documentation so you can consider Network Transfer costs when deciding the best way to do this. Feel free to reach out in a Support Ticket if you have account-specific questions about your Transfer usage, though you can monitor that in Cloud Manager to avoid additional charges.

Other Possible Options

Finally, I wanted to add a few links to useful guides for transferring Object Storage files in general. While I believe that Cyberduck is the best option, it's possible something about what you're doing may make it not the best choice. In addition to the options from the post I linked in the first paragraph, you may be able to figure out a way to use these tools to accomplish your goal, though I believe that most would be less direct and may require first moving your files to a server or computer and then moving them to the other bucket:

• Use Rclone to Sync Files to Linode Object Storage
• Syncing Files and Directories
• s4cmd
  • s4cmd dsync
  • s4cmd cp
  • s4cmd mv