Recently I have been considering the problem/importance of backing up certain data. The most important thing for me right now is the ~13GB of photos I have that aren’t really backed up anywhere. If I were to lose my entire hard disk today, I could get most of them back, but it wouldn’t be an easy task because they are on a hard drive in New Zealand. I think I have been very lucky so far because I haven’t had to deal with any loss of data even though I’ve never really had a decent backup system. One of my friends back in NZ had had a few HDD failures but he also had a decent backup system implemented so the loss of data was minimal.
Also, just for fun I worked out how long it would take to upload my 13GB of files at the lame 60KB/sec upload speed I have, and I think it was about 63 hours worth of uploading. Looks like my PC will be on for a few days.
Some few weeks ago I signed up for one of Amazon.com’s great services called Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). It is a really cheap way to store any files up to 5GB in size. (I don’t have much stuff in there yet, but last month it cost me 5 cents) One of the reasons why it is so cheap is because they do not provide any front end interface to deal with it. So if you want to upload files to it you need a third party program, or you need to write something yourself. (They have development community for this and lots of contributions from outside Amazon itself). Here is a really great FAQ about S3 as well as a backup program someone has written (I haven’t tried it yet).
So; picking a program to handle the uploads, and do the whole sync thing so that when I put something new into my photos folder, or My Documents or whatever, it would start uploading it to my S3 account. The most popular or at least most used program I can find is called Bucket Explorer. It costs $29.99. I am a big fan of freeware, or open source programs, but for something important, I think it is worth shelling out the relatively small fee of $30 to get something that I can rely on since this is a fairly important task.
To go for the free option, there is a very simple handy little Firefox extension that I found called S3 Organizer. It’s quick and easy for uploading or downloading a file or two, but not as full featured as the Bucket Explorer.
So that about covers my intention for off site storage, but I also need to set up some kind of on site storage also. My options for me, for this sort of scale would be setting up a RAID ? as well as possibly an external HDD (which I would probably also need some sort of program to make it easy to sync up my files between my PC and the drive). The third option is to set up a NAS (network attached storage). All of these options would be relatively inexpensive, it would just be a matter of buying several 500GB HDD. The best thing I could do would be to put another drive in my PC, set up a RAID. Get two more to put in the NAS, also in RAID. This is about the best option I can think of and would come out at $89.99×3 ~$270 for three 500GB Seagate 7200RPM 32MB cache drives, same as the one in my PC right now.
Next I need to buy/set up the Bucket Explorer and also consider the different options for NAS software.
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