Super Secure, Super Easy, Super Cheap On-Line Storage

Digital ProTalk: Business Day Thursday; Super Secure, Super Easy, Super Cheap On-Line Storage:


Hey gang, how many of you guys and girls are using on-line backup system? My guess is probably not many of you. Most of us are satisfied with our CDs, DVDs, cheap USB drives, etc.

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Get this, instead of spending the average $10/month for 10 gigs of on-line storage, you can get storage from Amazon for $1.50 per 10 gig/month. You heard right that’s only a dime and a nickel, fifteen cents, per gig! That’s about as cheap as it gets. Yep, you have to pay to upload those 10 gigs up to Amazon but that cost is only a $1.00. Furthermore, there is a retrieval cost but that amounts to $1.70/10 gigs to retrieve your data. but that’s still just a drop in the bucket.

When I originally started checking out storage solutions last year, a lot of the software available to simple data storage solution was still in beta. Now we have some solid solutions that make the entire process nearly effortless. Here is the link from Amazon showing some of those solutions right here. My two favorite solutions are Jungle Disc and Maluke.com.

I’ve been using S3 for a while, somewhat unreliably — but I’ve got my core photography data up there. When I got back from Yellowstone, I decided it was time to get serious (and automated!) so I stopped using Transmit (which I like) in favor of Jungle Disk, which I’m really coming to like. By adding in the advanced features for a tiny bit more money, you get the ability to continue large file transfers rather than having to restart them.

I’m currently resyncing my entire home directory up to S3. it’s going to (seriously) take a few days, but I’ve got about 2/3 of my iTunes stuff up there now.

That’s the aspect of this I don’t seem emphasized and which you have to remember. An online storage on a service like S3 is a CATASTROPHIC FAILURE recovery tool, as in “the house burned down, with the computers, and the fire-resistant safe melted, and it happened while you had your off-site disks on-site for refresh” type of failure. It’s very useful for individual “oops, dammit” file recovery, too — but what S3 and Jungle Disk really give you is the ability to get it back under worst-possible situations. Not quickly, but it’s better than being completely dead in the water, and it’s cheap insurance.

The one thing it’s forcing me to really think about is what “ought” to go up there. I’ve split my photo library into a couple of pieces as a result, my “working set” (aka keepers) and my “good stuff”. The latter gets stored on (multiple) hard disks, and every year or so, one of the disks gets copied onto a new disk — under the full belief I’ll never use any of those images again, because the things in my keeper set are better (but these aren’t dings…). Maybe some day I’ll feel confident enough to delete this secondary set of photos, but I doubt it… you never know.

And for all of those online storage startups out there, I’m using S3 for a couple of reasons: first, the price/performance/reliability of Amazon is a big sell, and second — I’ve seen too many of the online storage sites fail. Amazon? I just don’t think I’ll wake up one morning to find out that data’s gone and the servers are impounded in bankruptcy court…

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