We have no childhood pictures of my Mom—her father (accidentally?) threw them out with the trash when she was at college. That was a real tragedy.
With that in mind, I’ve been looking for an easy, permanent backup strategy for all my photos. A slough of solutions are available, but each had a fatal flaw (or two) I couldn’t live with:
- Extra hard drives are expensive and don’t help if your house burns down.
- Backup DVDs can be stored offsite, but you need a "management strategy" to make sure you update them every couple of months.
- Online storage services (e.g. XDrive, iDisk) are often too expensive.*
Of all of these, online storage is clearly the future—how can your homemade backup strategy compare to a massive server farm? A few months ago Amazon.com released Amazon S3: S3 stands for “simple storage service.” The service provides a programmatic interface to store objects on Amazon’s servers for insanely cheap prices. It’ll even encrypt your data on disk with a private key assigned to you.
Of course, it’s just a web service—you have to write the client. But, as Jeff Atwood says, if you need to build any piece of software, wait a month and someone will do it for you. And they have: JungleDisk. Jungle disk creates a virtual folder on your disk that acts as a portal to your S3 account. Backing up files is simply a matter of copying them into the folder (uploads are handled asynchronously in the background).
This is still a beta product, and it shows. But it’s a backup strategy that’s simple, cheap, and incredibly robust. That’s for me.
* There are some bargains. Streamload is a pretty good value and has a free account that beats Amazon below 25GB.