I was looking for a AWS S3 solution for backing up a Linux file system so that it would preserve the timestamp and permissions. It appears that s3cmd allows this by writing this information to the metadata for the object (file) on AWS S3 in the metadata.
Where is the metadata stored exactly? Is it part of the content of the file? Is there any chance it would corrupt the file? I'm trying to determine if using s3cmd to accomplish this is a safe option.
Metadata (data about data) is stored separately from the object, and will not corrupt the object. It's similar to the filename and the modified date. You can use object versioning to keep versions to help ensure this. S3 Metadata documentation can be found here. I can't speak to the reliability of s3cmd.
Instead of coping each file natively to S3 you should consider running backup software that stores the data onto S3. Restic could meet your requirements, it works well for me on Linux and Windows, but I haven't specifically checked out file modification dates - I suspect it preserves them.
