The following gets you from the state of not having an S3 account to getting Duplicator Pro backing up on S3 as quickly as possible. If you already have an S3 account you should be able to adapt the procedure for your needs.

1. Create an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Account

Follow this link to create an account.

2. Create a Bucket

A bucket is a storage area that you use to group data together. You can think of it like a virtual drive.  For our purposes we’ll assume you don’t already have a bucket and the bucket you’ll create will be dedicated to Duplicator Pro backups. This doesn’t have to be the case however – you can use existing buckets and put different types of data in a single bucket.

1. When at the AWS console service list, click S3 in the Storage & Content Delivery area.
   1. Note: You can return to the service list at any time by clicking the orange box in the upper left-hand corner.
2. Click Create Bucket.
3. Set the name to something you’ll remember and is unique.  It’s recommended you name the bucket to be something similar to a domain name. For instance backups.mydomain.com.
4. For the region, select the closest location to your web server.

3. Create a Security Policy

You’ll now need to create a security policy. The policy describes what the user can do. In this case we’ll be creating a policy that says a user can fully access the bucket we created in the previous step.

1. Go back to the AWS console service list and click IAM (Identity and Access Management) in the Security & Identity area.
2. Click on the Policies link on the left menu
3. Click the Create Policy button.
4. Click the JSON tab.
5. Copy and paste the policy defined on this page into the JSON text area.
   1. Note: Be sure to to replace BUCKETNAME with the name of your bucket as the Duplicator policy page instructs.
6. Click the Review policy button.
7. Name the policy “Duplicator Backup Policy” (or name this anything you want.)
8. Click the Create policy button.
9. Go back to the tab where you are creating the user from above.

4. Create a User

1. Click on the Users link on the left menu
2. Click the Add User button and add a new user with the name of your choice.
3. Check Programmatic access.
4. Click Next.
5. Click on Attach existing policies directly.
6. Search for the policy you created in the previous step, check it then click Next.
7. Click Next (No tags).
8. Click Create User.

5. Copy User Access and Secret Access Keys

You’ll now be presented with a screen that displays your Access Key ID and secret access key. While keeping this tab open, open a second tab to your website’s admin panel. Note: If you accidentally close the first tab or ever need to get the key information for a user in the future you can do so by going to the Users list > Click User > Security Credentials tab.

1. In the second tab, go to Duplicator Pro > Storages
2. Create a new Storage Endpoint
3. Choose Amazon S3 for the Type
4. Copy/Paste the Access Key from the first tab into the Access Key field.
5. Copy/Paste the Secret Key from the first tab into the Secret Key field.
6. Fill in the bucket and the region.
7. Unless you have a strong preference you can leave the Storage Folder and Storage Class fields alone.

7. Test Storage Endpoint

Now that things are configured you can see if the configuration worked properly by clicking the Test S3 Connection button.  If it reports success you are good to go. If not, go through the previous steps and make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Further Reading

The following articles can help you understand S3 more in-depth:

Getting Started with Amazon Simple Storage

Walkthrough: Using User Policies to Control Access to Your Bucket