evilrouters.net

a month or so ago, i downloaded jungle disk. i installed it on an older laptop i have running windows xp that has quite a few files on it i’d like to have backups of. i uploaded a few hundred megabytes of files to disk storage on the amazon s3 system and pretty much forgot about it.

a few days ago i was looking at my bank statement and seen a charge from amazon for $0.04 for the s3 storage. that got me thinking about backups again. i don’t really have any good backups here at home, other than keeping copies of “important stuff” on multiple machines — not exactly an ideal backup strategy.

i have an external usb drive that i’ve been wanting to use with time machine on my macbook to keep it backed up (it has pretty much became my “primary computer” in the last few months). i was keeping copies of important files on it, though, so i couldn’t just wipe it clean. instead, i first hooked it up to an ubuntu linux box that i have here, copied off all the important stuff, and then wiped it clean.

the external usb drive is now hooked up to the macbook and the first full backup (using time machine) is taking place as i write this (in textmate, of course!). it’s currently at 7.7gb of 105.9gb to back up. fun!

on the ubuntu linux box, jungle disk is hard at work backing up all my important files to the amazon s3 storage. i started out with 2.4gb of data to upload, mostly pictures and video that wouldn’t be easily replaced. with my cable modem connection (10 mbps down/1 mbps up), it’s going to take a while. once i get all the “important stuff” dumped onto amazon’s servers, however, and only occasionally add stuff to it, the backups will run much quicker.

i still have a few more pc’s to sift through in order to find everything i want backed up, but i don’t anticipate having more than 10gb or so of data stored on amazon’s servers. at their rates, that makes for very cheap off-site backups.

if you’re looking for a good solution to this same problem, i highly recommend amazon s3 and jungle disk. i’ve had no problems with either as of yet (granted i haven’t used either extensively). jungle disk is commercial software (only $20), but you can run it on as many pc’s as you have. they also have windows, linux, and os x versions that operate nearly identical. i haven’t installed the os x version yet, but i imagine i will before the day is over.