Finding and exporting your Amazon S3 data

What it holds

S3 holds objects such as documents, images, exports and application logs. A versioned bucket can also retain older object versions, and archive classes may require retrieval before copying.

Where Amazon S3 shows the size

1. Open S3 Storage Lens > Dashboards > default-account-dashboard and read Total storage and Object count on Overview; inspect bucket and storage-class breakdowns.
2. For one bucket, use Metrics > Bucket metrics or CloudWatch AWS/S3 metrics BucketSizeBytes and NumberOfObjects.
3. For object detail, create an Inventory configuration under Management and include Size, Last modified date and Storage class. Select current or all versions deliberately.

Plan and admin role. Use an IAM identity with Storage Lens and CloudWatch read access; root cannot view Storage Lens dashboards. Free metrics need no paid tier. Copying additionally needs source reads, destination writes and any relevant encryption-key permissions.

Exporting the full history

1. Generate Inventory as the copy checklist or Batch Operations manifest. The first report may take 48 hours.
2. Restore Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive objects before copying; use Batch Operations Restore for large sets.
3. Copy current objects with aws s3 sync s3://my-bucket /data/my-bucket or aws s3 sync s3://my-bucket s3://destination-bucket. After archive restoration, use --force-glacier-transfer where necessary.
4. For version-aware bulk work, use an all-versions Inventory and Batch Operations Copy. Copy older versions before current versions when ordering matters; compare destination counts and sizes with Inventory.

Storage metrics update daily; free Storage Lens history covers 14 days. Metrics across storage classes must be combined for a complete bucket view.

sync does not preserve object version history. Batch Copy supports objects up to 5 GB and manifests up to 20 billion objects; use multipart-capable copying such as the CLI for larger objects.

Archive restores can add retrieval and temporary-storage costs. Glacier Instant Retrieval needs no restore; Intelligent-Tiering archive restoration follows different charging rules.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.