Hi HN,
I would like to ask whether anyone has experience using S3 for personal data backup (documents, photos, video) and work.<p>Background: Just experienced an external hard drive failing on me. Traumatic and irritating =)<p>Hope that you can share how you've set it up (rsync?), some examples of the data you've stored and the costs that you are paying each month.<p>Luckily for me, Amazon just opened a data centre in Singapore =p<p>Thank you!
Ryan
Do you know about <a href="http://www.wuala.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.wuala.org</a> ? It's free if you share your disk space, it's redundant, and it's fast and easy. Backups, rsync, and regular file storage via a browser in a Java based client (runs everywhere I have tried) make this universally good. I never paid a cent to them, shared a couple of machines worth of 50GB of extra space that is up 100% of the time, and I have > 100GB of space available to me.<p>Linux backups are really easy: Wuala's client uses fuse to mount itself as a file system, so you can simply do periodic tar, or you can let their own backup mechanism back up your stuff to a special folder they maintain perfectly. You can get to your backed up files anywhere in the world via Wuala.com. This feature has saved me gobs of effort a bunch of times already.
I rather like <a href="http://rsync.net/" rel="nofollow">http://rsync.net/</a>. My critical, need to keep it offsite data backup requirements fit it well, there's one simple monthly charge and I can use rsync plus a handful of blessed shell commands to manage it. They also figured out a way to support git, which I use for projects that are too incomplete or unpolished to put up on GitHub. I looked very hard at S3 but it's rather inflexible for exactly what I want to do.<p>That said, I'm only storing my parent's photos and videos of their grandchildren (I'll lose all my media if my apartment is <i>truly</i> wiped out by a tornado, then again I'm unlikely to survive that). If you need to backup a <i>lot</i> of stuff S3 will be quite a bit cheaper (for me either is pocket change as of now).
bradfitz's brackup supports securely backing up data to S3 (and elsewhere), including incremental backups.<p><a href="http://code.google.com/p/brackup/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/brackup/</a><p>I don't actually use this, I just followed its development. For my backups, I have a script that spins up an Amazon EC2 instance, mounts an EBS disk and does an old-fashioned rsync of my entire machine.<p>This does mean I pay for the entire disk all the time every month, plus the EC2 time, and it's probably slower and more expensive than an equivalent brackup, but I also didn't have to think about it.<p>Right now, the EBS disk isn't bootable, but I could make it so and in theory just boot up an EC2 instance and immediately have my entire machine at the state it was last backed-up as.
I used to use S3 to backup data on my mac mini via JungleDisk. I was paying somewhere around $10-15/mo in storage costs after the initial fee of uploading the bulk of the data. Unfortunately after a system upgrade (not sure when or what specifically), the automatic sync w/ JungleDisk just stopped working. For several months none of my data was being copied back to S3.<p>What I really need is simplicity that _just works_. I found that in Dropbox and haven't gone back since. I use it to back up ~100Gb of data. On my other machines I just choose not to sync the larger directories and everything works perfectly.
I just set up s3fs on my linux server (<a href="http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon</a>) and pointed it at Google Storage for Developers (<a href="http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/getting-started.html" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/getting-started.htm...</a>). It's intended for use with S3 as the name implies of course. It's been working flawlessly so far :)!
CyberDuck (free, for Mac) otherwise JungleDisk ($$) to connect your machine to S3.<p>Don't backup your data to Singapore even if you are local, it will cost you more (compare costs across S3 DC's) and you don't need backup data to be close to you in the network.<p>S3 can work out expensive if you want to host a lot of data. Sometimes it can be cheaper to buy one of those 'unlimited' backup accounts with Mozy/etc as after a while the cost will be cheaper than Amazon.
Consider using duplicity to backup to gmail IMAPS. 7GB in a luxury, sea-side GOOG datacenter, free of charge forever. Need >7GB? Create another gmail acct.<p>The problem with paid services is that if you have even a temporary credit card/billing problem, they may nuke your data. Also, they're probably less reliable than gmail.
I've been using www.SMEstorage.com for this. They support multiple storage clouds as back ends, and have DropBox style tools that give me automated sync between multiple machines (and mobiles). Keeping all of my 'work' data safe and in sync between my desktop and laptop is costing me cents a month.
another vote for tarsnap - can't complain really. i knocked up a simple Haskell app to manage the process (I'm learning Haskell, so comments and suggestions welcome) if you're interested @ <a href="http://github.com/irv/tarsnap-backup" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/irv/tarsnap-backup</a>