Amazon’s Simple Storage Service or S3
Amazon S3 makes your data backup easy, secure and cheap. If you ever lost data whether to hard drive failure or just the accidental delete S3 can save your bacon. Amazon S3 lets you move, copy or delete file sizes up to 5 GB each, and you can store an unlimited number of files. If you have an Amazon account sign up is easy. If not what are you waiting for sign up today and start backing up you data.
You can store virtually any kind of data in any format. Amazon S3 uses proven cryptographic methods to authenticate users. It is your choice to keep your data private, or to make it publicly accessible by third parties. If you would like extra security, there is no restriction on encrypting your data before storing it in Amazon S3.
The only issue I found using S3 is they have no web interface to upload or download your files. You must use a 3rd party service that is partnered with them. I choose Jungle Disk.http://www.jungledisk.com/ (See description below)
And depending on your upload speed, your first backup my take some time. I setup my test backup of 10 gigs before I went to bed and it was finished in the morning.
You pay for Amazon only for what you use, when you use it. It costs 15 cents per gigabytes for storage, and 20 cents per gigabyte of data transferred.
Amazon’s S3 won a “Codie” award this month for “Best Storage Software Solution.”
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.
- Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
- Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
- Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
- Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
- Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
- Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
- $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
- $0.20 per GB of data transferred.
Jungle Disk
Jungle Disk works as an interface to Amazon.com’s super-secure and reliable Amazon Simple Storage Service (otherwise known as Amazon S3). Its available for Windows, Mac or Linux
Jungle Disk puts a virtual drive on your computer that looks like any another hard drive. And unlike some backups systems, you can browse, open, check and confirm the authenticity of every file in your backup by simply opening the folder, and using the files as if they were on your local hard drive. They’re not locked away in a cryptic, proprietary system.
The Jungle Disk application lets you set up automated backups, which looks for any file changes in the files or folders you specify, then backs up any modified files at the frequency you set. You set it and forget it.
Here’s a review from Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_c_2_182241011_9/002-1719418-2617654?ie=UTF8&node=219184011&no=182241011&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA
Here’s how it works.
Download and install Jungle Disk.
It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and only takes a few seconds to install.
Sign up for Amazon S3™ storage
You can use your existing Amazon.com account! It’s free to sign up and you’ll only pay for the storage you use.
Configure Jungle Disk with your Amazon Access Key
It will automatically prompt you the first time you run it.
Connect to your Jungle Disk
For Windows users, just use the Start Menu shortcut provided or map your disk to a local drive letter. On Mac, Jungle Disk will automatically appear as a mounted volume once configured. Connecting is easy for Linux users too.
Start using your Jungle Disk like a local hard drive!
You can copy files to it using Explorer (or Finder on Mac). When you copy a file to your Jungle Disk it is encrypted and uploaded in the background to Amazon.com’s servers.
Set up automatic backups (optional)
If you want to make sure your important files and directories are securely backed up on a regular basis, use the simple Automatic Backup feature.
Meanwhile behind the scenes…
Amazon S3™ provides a set of web services for web-scale, fast, reliable storage. They store your data in multiple data centers around the country for complete redundancy.
Jungle Disk runs on your local machine as a WebDAV server. WebDAV is a protocol for remote file access supported by all modern operating systems.
As you copy data to your Jungle Disk, it is transparently cached, encrypted, and uploaded to Amazon.com. Since uploads occur in the background, copying files to your Jungle Disk is as fast as a local hard drive.
When you browse your Jungle Disk, if the data is already available in the local cache nothing is downloaded from Amazon, which makes Jungle Disk super efficient.
