there was a S3 sync client that some people used that did:

    aws s3 sync --delete ./ s3://your-bucket/

The delete flag was added by just a very innocuous checkbox in the UI. The result is that it removes anything not in the source directory. Kaboom. Everything's gone. The point is you have no idea what stuff is going to do even if you think it's obvious.

Have you tried this? It takes forever to clean out a bucket. At the scale we're talking about, doing this on a single thread from the CLI tool means you could go home and come back the next day and cancel it then, and you still wouldn't have made a particularly big dent in the bucket. It's really a pain in the neck to delete a whole bucket full of data when you actually want to. It's "easy" to start off a recursive delete, sure, but I think you're overestimating the "kaboom" factor.

not every business critical bucket has petabytes of data in it

This one does. We're talking about Tumblr.

Maybe the moral is that you shouldn't rely on third party clients for mission critical stuff if you dont know what they do.

and also have backups like a normal competent person/organization does

I know in the particular example that is something that's good advise and more or less easily done.

Do you think it would be good to extend said argument to say scp / ftp clients?

awscli is a first-party client.

He mentioned a third party GUI wrapper on top of the CLI.

This would take so many hours to actually run though, probably weeks for that amount of data.

maybe someone at Tumblr can test this...

That's not accurate.

From the S3 management console user guide[1]:

> You can delete an empty bucket, and when you're using the AWS Management Console, you can delete a bucket that contains objects. If you delete a bucket that contains objects, all the objects in the bucket are permanently deleted.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/delet...

if you'd used the s3 management console, you'd know that it uses the same API as everything else, and so has to do the same list objects by page / delete a page dance just like everybody else... the only bulk optimization i can recall is the server side transfers for sync...