Online Backup Amazon

Amazon provides it’s Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3) which are an easy an non-expensive way to get access to virtually unlimited storage space. Amazon assigns space based on “buckets” which are containers for files, which can range from 1 byte to 5 Gigabytes and are hosted in Amazon’s network in the U.S.A. Or Europe.

Amazon’s S3 offering was one of the first cloud storage offerings publicly released, therefore it’s a mature and solid platform that is used by Inc. 500 companies and huge software distributors (along with Amazon’s network of global websites).

Access to such buckets is granted through a “developer key” which is unique to each bucket and grants access from anywhere to that specific bucket regardless of where it’s hosted (U.S.A.or Europe).

Each user can select the amount of space as well as the amount of transfer that they need in each bucket, and will pay on a per-Gb basis (both transfer and storage), starting at $0.12 per Gb of storage and $0.10 per Gb of transfer. The price per Gb goes down as the size of the bucket or the transfer increases. Amazon provides an online calculator so that customers can calculate their estimated storage and transfer usages for a given month. One good thing about Amazon S3 for backup is that there are no minium fee, which means that even small users can benefit from Amazon’s global network infrastructure at a very low price.

Taking the Amazon S3 foundation, users around the globe have created several backup softwares that use Amazon S3 as storage media. There are scripts and programs for nearly every operating system and most of them are released through an open source license, meaning that they are free to use and modify or customize. The simplest one of these scripts is S3DAV, which provides a WebDAV frontend for Amazon S3, allowing users to mount it as a virtual filesystem and perform mirror backups to it.

Most of the scripts and softwares created to use Amazon S3 as backup storage are released by third parties, so Amazon won’t back them up (as in legal or customer service backup), so before using Amazon S3 for backup, you should really look into the software that you’re planning to use, as the storage won’t fail, but a faulty piece of software might fail. Also make sure that there’s enough support, commercial or community based, since there’s nothing worse than having a backup but being unable to restore it after a hardware failure.