Monday 5 November 2007

s3sync rocks!

I finally got off my fat ass and setup an offsite backup of all my photos and other documents on Amazon S3. S3 is very impressive; very quick to setup and get going. I guess I'll find out in a month or so how cheap it really is :) but on paper it does look pretty cheap.

This article was a great overview of how to create backups using s3sync which is a ruby version of rsync which uses Amazon S3 under the covers. Neat! Add a little Anacron and hey presto, incremental online backups on all the macs in my house; and my wife won't kill me for loosing all the pictures of our daughter :).

(Yes I know flickr might be a better online backup for pictures; I just figured I wanted a general purpose backup mechanism that backed up anything I fancy, not just pictures).

3 comments:

Daniel Kulp said...

Just FYI: I'd also recommend rsync.net if you want something for private backups and with a more predictable cost structure. They give open source developers a 50% discount. For my case of just doing backups, it's perfect. $5/month for 6G of space and unlimited transfers. More importantly, standard SCP/SSH access to normal unix tools work as is.

Dan

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

When you using s3sybc every time a local file has been changed it will uploads the hole new file, not just what has changed. That means that if you are using s3sync for doing regular backups you are wasting unnecessary bandwidth.

You can bypass this limitation using our rsync to s3 gateway.
For more information take a look at our new service http://www.s3rsync.com/

Regards,
Addady