Copy S3 bucket objects across AWS accounts

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In this blog, I am going to explain about, how to transfer S3 objects from one AWS account to another.

Prerequisites

• Two AWS accounts(One for source S3 bucket and another for destination S3 bucket)
• Create an IAM user in destination AWS account (see this doc to create IAM user for AWS account).
• Configure AWS CLI in local machine with previously created IAM user credentials (see this doc to configure AWS CLI).

Step 1: Get the 12 digit destination AWS account number

Sign in to destination AWS account. Go to Support → Support center and copy account number from there.

Step 2: Setup source S3 bucket

Sign in to source AWS account. Create a bucket in S3(To create bucket, follow this doc). Attach the following policy to the bucket(To attach bucket policy, follow this doc). Upload some test files which are meant to be copied automatically to the destination bucket.

Step 3: Setup destination S3 bucket

Sign in to destination AWS account. Create a bucket in S3(To create bucket, follow this doc).

Step 4: Attach policy to IAM user in destination AWS account

Attach the following policy to the IAM user created previously in the destination AWS account (see this doc to add policy to IAM user).

Step 5: Sync S3 objects to destination

If above steps are completed, we can copy S3 bucket objects from source account to destination account by using the following AWS CLI command.

aws s3 sync s3://SOURCE-BUCKET-NAME s3://DESTINATION-BUCKET-NAME --source-region SOURCE-REGION-NAME --region DESTINATION-REGION-NAME

The above command should be executed with destination AWS IAM user account credentials only otherwise the copied objects in destination S3 bucket will still have the source account permissions and won’t be accessible by destination account users.

Conclusion

Now we have learnt how to copy S3 bucket objects from one AWS account to another. Try this approach and let me know if you have faced any issues, also if you have any other way to do this task, let me know.