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The File I Deleted at 2:13 AM Was Still Alive

The File I Deleted at 2:13 AM Was Still Alive

This article shows how AWS Bucket keeps your article alive even after deleting them.

Series: File deleting is not so simple nowadays (1 article)

  1. 1
    The File I Deleted at 2:13 AM Was Still Alive This article

Raju Bathole

I am a freelancer.

The AWS File That Refused to Die 👻

Part 1 — The Delete Button Lied

At 2:13 AM, I deleted a file from my Amazon S3 bucket.
The console said:
Delete successful.
So I closed my laptop.
Problem solved.
Or at least… that's what I thought.
The next morning, I started wondering about something very simple:
What does “delete” actually mean in the cloud?
I opened the bucket again.
The file was gone.
No report.pdf.
No error.
Nothing.
But then I discovered something that made me stop.
The file hadn't completely disappeared.
It was still there.
Not where I expected.
Not as the current object.
But somewhere inside S3…
there was still a version of it.

The first clue

The bucket had S3 Versioning enabled.
And suddenly the story changed.
My mental model had been:
1
2
3
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5
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7
Upload
↓
File exists
↓
Delete
↓
File is gone forever
But S3 can behave more like:
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2
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5
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7
8
9
10
11
Upload
↓
Version exists
↓
Delete
↓
Delete marker appears
↓
File looks deleted
↓
Older version may still exist
That tiny difference is easy to miss.
And it raises a much more interesting question:

If the file still exists…

what exactly did I delete?

The ghost inside the bucket

Imagine this object:
1
2
3
4
5
report.pdf

Version 1
Version 2
Version 3 ← current
Now I click Delete.
You might expect:
1
2
3
Version 1 ❌
Version 2 ❌
Version 3 ❌
But with S3 Versioning, a delete request can create a delete marker instead.
Conceptually:
1
2
3
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5
6
report.pdf

Delete Marker ← current
Version 3
Version 2
Version 1
To the normal application:
“The file doesn't exist.”
To S3:
“The current version is a delete marker.”
That difference is where things get interesting.

And then I found the strangest part…

What happens if that delete marker disappears?
Could the old file come back?
I decided to test it.
But before I show you what happened, there is another question we need to answer:
How can you permanently delete something in a versioned S3 bucket?
And that question becomes surprisingly important when the bucket contains:
  • backups
  • user documents
  • logs
  • datasets
  • financial records
  • application artifacts
Because “Delete” and “Permanently delete” are not always the same thing.
# amazon-s3# amazon-s3-metadata

Series: File deleting is not so simple nowadays (1 article)

  1. 1
    The File I Deleted at 2:13 AM Was Still Alive This article
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