Offsite Backup
Jan. 26th, 2007 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drploktaThis seems useful enough that it should be better known. It allows you to use space on Amazon's S3 simple storage service as a locally mounted disk, on Windows, Mac or Linux clients, and has a basic backup program built in. It encrypts all your data, either using your Amazon private key (so that you can retrieve the key from Amazon, but they could theoretically snoop) or any key of your own choosing (so no one can snoop, but if you lose the key you lose your data).
I have my 20GB Documents directory backing up right now. A couple of catches. First, it's going to take about 10 days, but that represents over ten years' accumulation of files, so it will be fairly easy to keep it updated once the first bulk run is done. That's on a 256kbit/sec upstream ADSL connection which I've throttled back to 200kbit/sec (an option on the software) so that downstream performance (web browsing etc.) is not impaired during the backup. Second, S3 is not free. But for 20GB of data, Amazon will charge me US$4 to upload it, $3 per month to store it and another $4 if I ever have to download the lot to restore it. Doesn't seem too unreasonable. And I had a $50 amazon.com, instead of .co.uk gift voucher for Christmas and was wondering what I could spend it on.
I have my 20GB Documents directory backing up right now. A couple of catches. First, it's going to take about 10 days, but that represents over ten years' accumulation of files, so it will be fairly easy to keep it updated once the first bulk run is done. That's on a 256kbit/sec upstream ADSL connection which I've throttled back to 200kbit/sec (an option on the software) so that downstream performance (web browsing etc.) is not impaired during the backup. Second, S3 is not free. But for 20GB of data, Amazon will charge me US$4 to upload it, $3 per month to store it and another $4 if I ever have to download the lot to restore it. Doesn't seem too unreasonable. And I had a $50 amazon.com, instead of .co.uk gift voucher for Christmas and was wondering what I could spend it on.