If you are using backup gem for creating your backups to s3 bucket (or any other gem) logging to your AWS console web interface each time you want to download backup is painfull.

Much faster solution is to fetch the dump via console with s3cmd

sudo apt-get install s3cmd

First you need to create user http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/Using_SettingUpUser.html and add him a role that will allow s3 access (e.g. S3FullAccess )

Now that you have Access Key ID and Secret Access Key you can configure s3cmd

s3cmd --configure

One thing you should avoid are special chars in passphraze http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16512312/s3cmd-incomplete-format-error/16714176#16714176

To try if it works do:

s3cmd ls

You should see list of your bucket names. If you getting 403 you didn’t configure your user role ore you misspeld the key/secret

Depending on where/how you store backups you can list what’s the latest backup with:

s3cmd ls s3://my-project-production-dbbackup/production_db_backups/my-projcet_backup/

and download it with

s3cmd get s3://my-project-production-dbbackup/production_db_backups/my-projcet_backup/2014.11.11.10.07.14/my-project_backup.tar /tmp/