Backing up your data - Part I

"I've never had a hard drive crash on me."  That is the phrase I kept using as an excuse to put off setting up a backup system for my home computers.  That and the tons of space that I would need to fully backup my important data.  Images, mp3s, videos, important files, etc., on multiple computer... oh the logistics!  Well you can pretty much imagine what I'm going to say after the break...

Yes, I had a hard drive crash.  The casualties included over 100 hours of video.  This was not acceptable.  I'm vowing not to let this happen again.  Only problem is I still have the same "logistics" problem.  How am I going to backup multiple computers without breaking the bank.  And more importantly, how can I trust the hard drives on my backup systems?

One possible answer came to me following a recent chat with a co-worker.  How about Amazon S3?  My first reply was Amazon 'S' what?  Once I was informed about the existence of S3 I was intrigued.  I did some research.  From the site: "Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It’s a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly-scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs. "  Now since I'm a software developer I was doubly intrigued, but what does all of that mean? 

In a nutshell, Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is designed to be highly flexible. You can store any type and amount of data that you want; read the same piece of data a million times or only for emergency disaster recovery.

So how about the cost? Amazon S3 lets users pay only for what they consume and there is no minimum fee. Users pay $0.150 per GB for the first 50TB.  There are more storage payment scales that I won't get into.  I don't know about you, but I'd have a hard time coming up with 50 terabytes of data.  Data transfer (to and from S3 storage) also have an associated cost. Data transferred into Amazon S3 costs $0.10 per GB. Developers pay $0.170 per GB data transfer out for the first 10 TB. My backups require about 125GB of disk space today without compression. That'd cost me $18.75 per month (or $225 per year) to store on Amazon's S3.  Hmmm, that compares pretty well with what I'd have to pay to create a home backup system.  Might be worth more reaearch.

All the above sounds good and all, but I thought how can this help the average person backup their data and how much does it cost?  Oh and how does it compare with the typical home server backup system or even existing web backup packages like Carbonite.  I'm going to dig in because I do not want you or me to lose any more valuable data. Please catch Part II of this blog thread for continued detail on my search for a convenient and safe backup system.