Moving Asterisk Recordings to Amazon S3

A lot of call center recordings

It’s increasingly common for users of Asterisk who have to manage a large number of recordings to want to push their backlog of recordings to the Cloud. It saves on local storage, and is nearly infinitely expandable. The conversation often comes around to Amazon S3. It has a number of advantages, including capacity, a reasonable cost per gigabyte, and compatibility with Glacier, which offers long-term storage capacity at a lower cost per gigabyte. Amazon also has APIs that can be used to interact with your storage.

There are a number of ways you can get your recordings into the Cloud. s3cmd is a command-line tool that is fairly straightforward to configure and can be installed in Linux distributions such as Ubuntu fairly easily. In the case of Ubuntu, a simple

apt-get install s3cmd

will install it.

Accessing the files can be straightforward as well. Amazon provides some tools. Indosoft Q-Suite, which was designed to present recordings from multiple Asterisk servers, also has support for recordings in Amazon S3. Simply updating the database record when the file is moved is enough to get the job done.

There is a discussion of this in a bit more depth here and an example of a multi-process, locking bash script to move recordings to S3 is available here.