Ok, so backing up your data never seems as important as when you loose that data, and I speak from experience when I tell you that paying over $1,000 to have a hard drive forensically recovered is the worst!
I currently keep all of my data in an external hard drive known as a NAS (Network Attached Storage)…more about that awesome piece of technology from NETGEAR later. So I have a redundant hard drive storage device, but I wanted to be able to get some portion of my most valuable data off-site to a virtual backup. Enter Amazon S3! S3 Pricing. At $0.14 a GB, it is a steal compared to other online storage services once you go past their initial free storage. Amazon also has a free portion to their service as described in the pricing page.
So I use my existing Amazon.com account to sign up for the S3 storage and presto…I have cloud based storage for all my valuable data. I can access my storage from any web browser and upload and download files via this same interface. And with Amazon’s rock solid reputation as a solid service provider and near flawless online retailer, I felt safe and secure in knowing my information would be there for years to come should anything happen to my local copies.
Now all I needed was a way to automate the backup process to my new cloud storage. In my next post I will introduce you to CloudBerry Lab Cloudberrylab and the slick product they have that does exactly that.
EDIT: Amazon S3 announces Glacier at a fraction of the price of S3 storage…check it out!