How to keep a local copy of all images and still serve images from Amazon S3?

Question

I'm using amazon s3 to host assets for my site (mainly images). At the moment when a user uploads an image via a form, the php script uploads the image directly to my bucket on s3.

I would like to keep a local copy of every image that's uploaded so that if amazon decides to drop me as a customer for whatever reason, I will at least have all my images to backup from and not have my site be forever lost.

Right now I am doing manual backups by downloading all the images that were uploaded at the end of each day via the Control Panel on the AWS site. I'm looking for a better automated way to achieve this.

I'm sure there are others that also keep a local copy of assets and use amazon to host just for the CDN benefits. What method/script or tool do you guys use to achieve this?

Answer 1

I've been trying to answer as many unanswered question as I can, so I thought I'd reiterate what "danleefree" posted above as a comment.

It should be pretty easy to modify the script to save the file locally before uploading it to Amazon.

I do agree that this is a good idea, as you would always want to have access to your files rather than having them all hosted by a third-party.