Quickstart

Five minutes. You need a working mito and AWS credentials in the usual place.

First, how to name things

Every command takes paths in the same four shapes. Learn these and the rest is easy.

  /home/me/report.pdf        one local file
  /home/me/data/             a local folder  (note the slash)
  s3://my-bucket/report.pdf  one S3 object
  s3://my-bucket/data/       an S3 folder    (note the slash)

The trailing slash matters. It is the only thing that tells mito whether you mean one file or a whole tree.

You can also pin a region by adding @region to any S3 path:

s3://my-bucket/data/@eu-west-1

Without it, mito asks S3 where the bucket lives. That costs one extra API call, and it fails on some non-AWS services. Pinning is faster and more portable, so it is a good habit.

Compare two local folders

mito ./data/ /mnt/backup/data/

diff is the default command, so you can leave the word out. Exit code 0 means everything matched.

Compare local against S3

mito diff ./data/ s3://my-bucket/data/

Nothing big gets downloaded. That is the whole point. See Architecture.

Get a report a script can read

mito diff ./data/ s3://my-bucket/data/ -o results.json

The file extension picks the format: .json, .csv, or plain text for anything else.

When a file differs, the report does not just say "this file is wrong". It narrows the problem down for you:

  file.bin  ──►  8 MiB chunks  ──►  the one that differs  ──►  64 KiB blocks
                 [ ][ ][X][ ]              chunk 2            [ ][X][ ][ ]

  result: "bytes 16777216-16842751 differ"

So you learn where two copies diverged, not just that they did.

Sync, carefully

Always dry-run first. --delete really does delete.

mito sync ./data/ s3://my-bucket/backup/ --dry-run   # look
mito sync ./data/ s3://my-bucket/backup/             # do it

Direction comes from the order of the arguments. Source first, destination second. Swap them to download instead of upload.

Remember: sync decides by size and modification time, not by checksum. It skips a file only when the sizes match and the destination is newer. That catches an ordinary edit. It does not catch a restore that put an old timestamp back. When you need certainty, run diff.

Delete objects

rm will not delete anything until you add --force. Without it, you get a preview.

mito rm s3://my-bucket/old-data/ --recursive          # preview
mito rm s3://my-bucket/old-data/ --recursive --force  # do it

See what it cost

mito stats

The counts add up across every run and are kept on disk. See stats.

Clean up what failed

mito leftovers my-bucket --older-than 7d           # list
mito leftovers my-bucket --older-than 7d --abort   # clean

When a big upload fails halfway, S3 keeps the parts it already received. It also keeps charging you for them. They show up in no object listing, so nobody ever notices. This is how you find them.

Where to go next