I have been meaning to buy an external hard-drive to backup a lot of my data. Well, today I decided to try out Amazon S3 as my storage medium instead of an external hard-drive.
JungleDisk has proven a great program to transfer files to S3. In addition to working on Windows, Linux, and Mac, it allow the mounting of S3 buckets as hard-drives. Very good program to work with. Right now, I am backing up my Linux desktop and my Windows laptop.
Whether or not I stick with it, I don’t know. Right now, I have around 40GB of data to backup, which is $6 a month on S3 and $4 for initial upload. I am guessing, I will probably have to spend close to $10 a month for this service. Considering 500GB external hard-drives run about $100 right now, it doesn’t seem extremely cost effective. Then again, I am also paying for data redundancy and recoverability, right? Something tells me, this service will get me to organize my files better and delete files I don’t care about. Either way, I can afford to try it out for a few months, which is something you can’t really say about a hard-drive.
Lastly, here is a good guide on using rsync with S3.