Working with Amazon S3 storage

I was using duplicity on Amazon S3 storage for backup, but gave it up because it was waaaay too slow (I believe the slowness was mainly duplicity, rather than network traffic or S3). So, time to delete the data from S3. I logged onto the Amazon S3 web interface, but found it pretty useless: I had hundreds of files to delete and there was no way to 'select all', or even delete a whole bucket at once. In fact, I couldn't even get the web interface to delete a single file for me. Seems like it is in Amazon's interest to make deleting data hard...

So I installed the 's3cmd' package on Ubuntu, which worked a treat. Setup with:

s3cmd --configure

Then to delete all the data in a bucket:

s3cmd del s3://data.bucket.name/*
s3cmd rb s3://data.bucket.name