Hello.
2 questions.
1) What is the process to move all old images to S3 and keep working with the external storage from now on...
2) Also to have all images backupped to local should i do this manually (copy from S3 to Server)?
One more thing to keep in mind, is the URL for each image would change as well so anyone whom has you images embedded/hotlinked will begin showing an error as the image would no longer be at the same location.
I have been kicking around this issue as well, as I moved to external mirrors but I am stuck with 100's if GB's of images on my primary web server.
I really want an automated method for this. Something that copies a folder and pushes them to another storage method like S3... :/ It's a pain honestly.
Yes, I had 30K images on S3 and I needed to move them to other external storage provider. Ended up doing it all manually and I still have that Amazon S3 placeholder in my external storage settings.
What I did was moved all the images from S3 and created a new external storage in the settings with the same url. Good thing I used the custom subdomain to serve images from S3, so it was much easier. I am too lazy to write few lines of db query to migrate to new external storage. Why bother, everything is working just fine.