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Comment on Ask HN: Using S3 for personal data backup?

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CyberDuck (free, for Mac) otherwise JungleDisk ($$) to connect your machine to S3.

Don't backup your data to Singapore even if you are local, it will cost you more (compare costs across S3 DC's) and you don't need backup data to be close to you in the network.

S3 can work out expensive if you want to host a lot of data. Sometimes it can be cheaper to buy one of those 'unlimited' backup accounts with Mozy/etc as after a while the cost will be cheaper than Amazon.

The EU west region is just as cheap as the US standard, so if you want to backup off continent and not pay more you can. As far as the unlimited backup plans go, how does their durability compare to S3 or SpiderOak? It seems like if they're so much cheaper they can't have as much redundancy.

It seems like if they're so much cheaper they can't have as much redundancy.

They probably don't have the same amount of redundancy as S3 but then redundancy is a subjective thing.

A backup service might claim that your data is only stored in one place (ie no redundancy) but that it's very stable.

Amazon S3 might be more diverse but it's also volatile - Amazon claim that they cannot guarantee not to loose data.

nobody can claim that they 100% won't loose your data. (I mean, they can claim that, but everyone has problems from time to time. Bad things happen. Magnetic storage is fragile.) Amazon, from what I understand, has one of the best documented systems; and with six (6!) copies of your data, well, that's better than any other storage system I know of, and their price is pretty good.

Now, amazon is pretty expensive if you access the data often... but beating their prices for archive storage (with six copies!) is damn hard. I've been looking at competing with them for a while, and it looks like what I might end up doing is selling space with a significantly lower level of redundancy (2-3 copies) at a lower rate, with a significantly lower network transfer charge.

Even so, the amazon system is really nice.

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