Amazon S3 Hosting Storage Space

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!