Another note about backups - and the fabulous Amazon S3
Backups are necessary. We just talked about that in the previous post. I talked about Aronis True Image. Acronis is great to get a backup of your computer - incluging the OS, files, applications, Etc. OK, but where do you put your backups? Most people backup to an external hard drive or DVD’s that are stored right in the shelf next to the computer. While that might be OK in 99% of the cases, there is always that unfortunate chance that your entire office or home gets in the path of a hurricane, flood or forest fire. Now we sincerely hope that no such thing happens to you, but you’ll sleep better knowing that your most imporant personal and business data is protected in such a situation. Keeping your backups off-site is the way to go. Sooner done the better.
Cost for off-site backups used to be high in the past. Most often you’d need a dedicated server and end up costing thousands of dollards annually. Now that’s a thing of the past. Welcome to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a web-service based offering by Amazon. Amazon has a tremendously powerful website as you know at Amazon.com. It gets more traffic than all websites in Raleigh put together perhaps and more complex features than most websites on the Internet and millions of vendors selling their products on their website. A fully automated product management and inventory management capability and the ability to provide guarantees on price, shipping, delivery and a solid feedback mechanism. To run all that is no simple task. They have thousands of servers in state-of-the-art data centers and configurations that few people in the world can image. Such capability meant that they are experts in not just selling online but also on IT infrastructure. They are also experts on webservices and one of the first to bring serious ones to the market that allow other people to create stores using amazon products for an affiliate commission.
As a smart company, they decided to put those 2 fields of expertise to use - web service and IT infrastructire. And that gave birth to Amazon S3 and we’re sure you are going to hear a lot more about it in the future. In essence it’s a service that makes it easy to trasfer your files from your PC or your website to Amazon via a high-bandwidth connection (which is a BIG deal, because uploads over the internet are generally slow, which makes it difficult to upload a large amount to data off-site on a regular basis). And the best part is that it’s cheap. At about 20 cents per GB of storage, it’s really cheap for the kind of protection that Amazon offers. No wonder many are using it already since the launch in 2006.
Several companies such as Seco backup and EzS3 have tools available that make it easy to use Amazon’s service. This is a handy list of amazon s3 tools. Jungle Disk and Backup Manager are perhaps the leading ones in the PC and Mac home backup market.
Another benefit of Amazon S3 is saving storage space. I used to have tons of unused storage space at home. Hard disks, DVD’s, zip drives that are hardly used, etc. Each of them would have some backup that I did at some point and I didn’t want to risk deleting them so they kept taking up space. Another problem with website backups is that once your website becomes slightly larger (500 MB - 1 GB storage or more), downloading the website’s files on a regular basis for backup takes forever and breaks all the time due to network issues. Having automatic backups with Amazon S3 takes care of both of those issues for the most part.
Give it a serious thought. You set it up once and forget. Worth the money and highly recommended!
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