Jeremy Zawodny's been looking at options to replace his traditional home backup server with something a little more modern and potentially better from a cost and maintenance perspective. He's looking at Amazon S3 for that purpose.

Not too long ago, Amazon released their Simple Storage Service (or "S3" for short). It provides a hosted storage platform which developers can build all sorts of applications on top of. Smugmug, a popular photo sharing web site, is using it to store and host pictures.

I've been considering using S3 as the backend to an on-line backup, since I'd been beating that for a while (see: Swimming Pools and Hard Disks and Cheap On-Line Storage Coming Soon).

In a few days I'll write about how to do this--I'm only partially through the process right now. But right now I want to lay out the motivation for doing this.

I'll be keeping my eye on this, since I was thinking about trying something similar. The idea of buying yet another piece of hardware, which could sit at home on a slower connection and potentially break on me over time, is less appealing than a sufficiently secure system that I could get to from literally anywhere. And as I work more and more with larger pieces of personal data, the need continues to grow.

Source: Replacing my home backup server with Amazon's S3
Originally published on Wed, 04 Oct 2006 04:51:36 GMT Technorati tags: S3, backup, server, Zawodny