Welcome to the lesson on mastering file versioning and management in cloud storage. File versioning is a powerful feature that helps protect your data by keeping multiple versions of objects stored in the cloud. With versioning enabled, every time you upload or modify an object, a new version is created and preserved. This allows you to recover previous versions in case of accidental overwrites or deletions, ensuring the integrity and recoverability of your data.

In this lesson, you will learn how to enable, use, and manage versioning in your cloud storage buckets. These skills are essential for maintaining robust backup strategies and for applications that require historical data retention.

To enable versioning on a storage bucket, you need to update the bucket's configuration to turn on the versioning feature. Once versioning is enabled, every new upload or modification to an object in the bucket will result in a new version being created.

Here is how you can enable versioning for a bucket named my_bucket:

In some cases, you may want to stop creating new versions for objects in a bucket. While you cannot completely disable versioning once it has been enabled, you can suspend it. Suspending versioning means that new uploads or modifications will overwrite the current version, but all previously created versions will remain accessible.

To suspend versioning on a bucket:

Suspending versioning does not remove existing versions. All previously stored versions remain available for retrieval.

After enabling or suspending versioning, it is important to verify the current status of versioning on your bucket. You can check whether versioning is enabled or suspended by inspecting the bucket's properties.

Here is how to check the versioning status:

Understanding the versioning status helps you manage your data protection strategy effectively.

When versioning is enabled on a bucket, every upload or modification of an object creates a new version. You can upload files from your local system or upload data directly as an object.

To upload a file from your local system:

To upload content directly as an object:

Each upload creates a new version if versioning is enabled.

You can retrieve the latest version of an object or download it to your local system. By default, retrieving or downloading an object without specifying a version will give you the latest version.

To retrieve the latest version of an object:

To download the latest version of an object to a file:

To manage and audit your objects, you may want to list all available versions of a specific object. This can be done by listing all blobs with versions enabled and filtering by the object name.

Here is how to list all versions of a specific object:

This provides a history of all versions, including their generation numbers and timestamps.

If you need to access a previous version of an object, you can do so by specifying the generation number (which acts as the version identifier).

To retrieve a specific version of an object:

To download a specific version to a file:

In this lesson, you learned about file versioning in cloud storage, including how to enable and suspend versioning on a bucket, verify the versioning status, upload objects to a version-enabled bucket, retrieve and download both the latest and specific versions of objects, and list all available versions of an object. These capabilities are essential for protecting your data, supporting backup strategies, and maintaining access to historical versions as needed. Keep practicing these operations to strengthen your data management skills in cloud storage environments.