Amazon S3: The Secret that Won't Be Secret for Long
Written: Jun 14 '07
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I am a horribly lazy computer owner. There is nothing I hate more in this world than backing up my files on some form of media (CDs, for example) that I will then lose, scratch, or have destroyed by my children. With the proliferation of online services, I was soon hooked by the concept of online backup, but quickly discovered that most of the service were PC-oriented, and I needed something that could not only handle my old PC, but my new MacBook as well. Enter Amazon S3.
::: What Is It, and How Does It Relate to Books? :::
Amazon is about much more than books, and actually has a whole 'nother side to their business under the umbrella of Amazon Web Services. Part of Amazon Web Services, Amazon S3 is shorthand for Amazon Simple Storage Solution. It allows developers to use Amazon's massive data centers for data storage, paying only for what they need. Of course, I'm not a developer, so why would I use a scalable storage solution?
Simple: it's cheap. Less than $2.00 a month to store my 8 GB of non-replaceable data. And that includes my iTunes library.
::: How Do I Do This? :::
To use Amazon S3, you need two things: an Amazon Web Services account and some type of interface. I use a handy little program called Jungle Disk (available at http://www.jungledisk.com) that can run on PC, Mac, or Linux. Jungle Disk allows me to hook up my Amazon S3 space as a drive on my machine, letting me transfer files back and forth just like I would any network server. I can also use Jungle Disk to perform automatic backups of my machine so that my information is saved on a regular basis without me even having to think about it.
::: So What Does It Cost? :::
Like I said, Amazon S3 is dirt cheap. The previous service I was using was costing me $50 a year, which still seems fairly reasonable. However, that $50 is whether you access your data or not.
Here's a breakdown of pricing:
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests
As you can see, even if you are using this like a network drive for additional machine storage, for personal users, it's not going to cost you much at all. My charges for this month so far are $1.50, and that includes moving several thousand tiny little files back and forth (since my Windows network didn't want to play nice with my Mac, I used my Amazon S3 account to transfer files between machines. That's still way under the $50 a year fee some of the other services use, and if I delete some of the old files I don't need anymore, it will cost even less.
Best of all? There is no limit to the number of computers I can back up using Amazon S3. Other services will charge you a license fee to install their software on more than one machine, but right now, Jungle Disk is free to install, so all I have to pay for is my data storage and access. I now have three machines backing up to my account, and will soon add two more. That would have been $250 a year with my old service. Now, if I hit $60 a year for five machines, it ends up being a bargain, doesn't it?
Amazon S3 may take a little bit of effort to set up, since you have to sign up for an account and find your keys, but the savings is worth the extra few steps. And I never have to worry about data loss on my machines again.
Recommended:
Yes
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pippadaisy
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Divorce seriously cuts into the amount of time for reviewing.
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