How I automated my backups to Amazon S3 using s3sync
Amazon S3
Amazon has made an effort in the past two years promoting their Amazon Web Services (AWS). They are unconventional but appeal through the sheer simpleness and power. Large web services like Smugmug.com use Amazon S3.
Introduction to S3
Honkiat.com has a nice detailed beginners guide to Amazon S3, and considering the benefits and costs, it might just be the next replacement for your home server. For more details, you can always check out Amazon’s website or this article on Digital Inspiration:
So, storing about 30GB of files with a bandwidth consumption of 1TB a month on a highly scalable, durable hardware, maintained by experts at the cost of just about $25 a month; that’s just awesome.
What to use it for?
Amazon S3 is just your storage facility on the web. It isn’t free but not expensive as well. Things to do with it:
- Backing up your data - getting a copy of your important data off-site is a no-brainer. But it has to be simple and straigtforward or you don’t use it. Even larger companies ignore the problems that can rise after some disaster happens.
- Getting your blog’s media files somewhere else - if your blog grows you might run into bandwidth boundaries. One solution is to get your images on S3. There is even a Wordpress plugin for Amazon S3 to make the effort seamless for WP users.
- Scale up and up… as AWS is a flexible service you can actually grow larger and larger
Companies like National Geographic, Oracle and many more are happily using Amazon S3.
Further reading…
How To: Bulletproof Server Backups with Amazon S3
How I automated my backups to Amazon S3 using s3sync
Software Mac OSX
Persistence
Persistence looks like a winner. The developer works at Apple and claims:
Persistence is a reliable and flexible online backup solution for Mac OS X Leopard that is compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, iDisk… (it even supports offline backups to external drives).
Persistence is a true Mac product that preserves Finder info, resource forks, ACLs… and comes with an elegant user interface and a powerful assistant.
Jungle Disk
Jungle Disk is an already established name and seems to work well. However you actually can’t really buy the software, they require you to subscribe for US$2/month (=$ 24 a year, $96 for 4 years - that really sums up!). You can actually buy a crippled version for US$ 20 but for all features you are asked to subscribe (again..) for US$1/month.
Just sell me the damn software. It takes my accountant more than US$ 1 or 2 to actually process this tiny bill every month!
ExpanDrive
ExpanDrive has a good press, like a recent article on TUAW.
CyberDuck
CyberDuck is a your really good, “gold standard”, good-ole’ FTP client that handles all kinds of servers, S3 included.
Overweight can protect you reads an article in the New York Times. It refers to a large Canadian study that examined more than 10,000 people.
An Andrew Smith has a nice solution to 
