IT Admin: How to backup Box team folder (i.e. admin account) to Amazon S3 (Glacier or Deep Archive)

Table of Contents

Introduction

This support note is about how to back up your Box Enterprise account when all the data is under the control of a single Box admin account. However, if data ownership is scattered among different Box users, please refer to the support note titled IT Admin: How to back up Box Enterprise or Box Business.

These guidelines pertain to the setup of Box Enterprise, where all your company data is held and governed under a single Box admin account. For instance, a Box admin account can have the following directory structure:

/Human Resources (shared with human resources department)
/Projects        (shared with all employees working on projects)
/Finances        (shared with finances department)

With cloudHQ, you can establish a real-time backup of an admin Box account to Amazon S3 / Glacier or any alternate cloud storage platform. By automatically backing up every single modification made to your Box files or folder, real-time data backup is achieved. This implies that cloudHQ is essentially archiving every iteration of your Box files and storing them in your backup cloud storage dedicated space. So Box admin restore data (or construct a snapshot of your system) to any chosen point in time. In essence, cloudHQ’s backup feature can be considered as a cloud version of Apple Time Machine.

You can back up not only Amazon S3 but also to a Dropbox folder, Google Drive, etc. The instructions are pretty much the same – just select a Google Drive account and folder instead of Amazon S3.

And to set up real-time backup of Box accounts you basically need to create backup sync pair (backup sync pairs are basically definition how to backup certain users) which will backup your admin Box account to a dedicated folder. For example, something like this:

Box (admin@acme.com)   -> Amazon S3/Backup_bucket/Box_FULL_BACKUP

And here are step-by-step instructions how to achieve that:

Box Business and Box Enterprise Preparation:

  1. Ensure that you are a Box admin. The instructions are here: Box for Business admin.
  2. In some Box installations, third-party applications might be disabled. You will need to check if third-party applications are disabled in your Box account and enable them. Instructions for how to check that are here: https://support.cloudhq.net/how-to-enable-cloudhq-third-party-application-in-box-enterprise/.

Amazon S3 Preparation:

Before we start the cloudHQ wizard to back up your Dropbox users, we first need to create an appropriate Amazon S3 bucket, Amazon AWS AIM user, and configure Amazon Glacier policies for your backup bucket (if needed).

Authorize cloudHQ to access your Amazon S3

In order to back up to Amazon S3, cloudHQ needs to be authorized to access your Amazon S3 bucket dedicated for backup.

To do that, you must provide a key ID and a secret access key of an AIM user with full read-write access to your backup bucket. If you don’t know what that is, please check here: https://support.cloudhq.net/how-to-figure-out-your-access-key-id-and-secret-key-in-amazon-s3/.

  • Go to the Cloud Accounts and click the Amazon S3 icon:
  • Authorize your Amazon S3 account:

    • Amazon S3

Authorize cloudHQ to access your Box admin account

 

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