Amazon S3

So, I’m getting a bit of disk space filled up by now, much of witch is client data and template files for the web. I have an external hard drive and another drive on my desktop for double backup, but that just leaves me protected locally if one drive fails. I have nightmares of the day with my laptop bites the dust and for some reason my desktop gets zapped . . . worst case scenario (or, Lord forbid, my house burns). Online storage keeps everything “safe” at a distance.

I wanted a low cost (ok, cheap) solution for backing up online. I have heard of Carbonite and Box.net, but I need LOTS of space (over 20 GB) and those guys start to add up as yearly rates roll along.

Enter Amazon Storage (www.amazon.com/s3) – they charge 15 cents per gigabyte for storage and 10 cents per GB of transfer. I use that service in conjunction with Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com, $20) and my files are automatically backed up every evening. Without going through the math with you, 10 GBytes or so of client data was backed up and stored last month for less than 2 dollars. Yeah, that’s cheap. You can also encrypt data for security and access the backed up data as a networked drive – that way you can just drag and drop back to your computer if needed.

I’ve been with the service for a month, so I’ll let you know if I change my mind about it. Oh, and the system doesn’t upload files every night that haven’t changed – just the files that have been created or revised since the day before. Good stuff.