Are you ready for Amazon S3...Maybe?

This is sort of a continuation of my previous post about Amazon S3.

While was looking for a way to use Amazon S3 without doing any coding, I ran into a couple of beta programs. Some of which just didn't seem to work right. I was looking for a program that would copy the files to S3 daily and wouldn't change the name of the files. JungleDisk was one of the first I looked at and it would constantly be doing a get and put while uploading the data along with changing the file name (if you used only JungleDisk you won't realize this). As mentioned in my previous post, S3 backup and S3interface.com were good candidates but they didn't do automated backups. S3interface limits the file size to 10MB and you can only upload from within the web GUI. S3 backup on the other hand with the release of S3 backup beta 12 the automated feature now works and I have been using it successfully for 2 months.

I have S3 backup installed on my "monitoring" server (which monitors all of my web/sql servers) where the external HD is directly connected. So after my backups run I scheduled an upload within S3 backup to upload the changed files. I also installed this program on my desktop. Since I can connect to the same bucket I can see if, what time and which files where uploaded. It works great!

The only problem I had with this program was when I created two jobs. I was trying to use multiple buckets to store the files for the different servers that I backup. When I would run the second job it would put all of the files in the first bucket and overwrite the files from the previous job. I worked around this by creating a single job using one bucket with multiple folders. As a consequence, this is much easier to view all of the files at once. So when reviewing my backup files I can quickly look at all of the files quickly.

Since this has been working so well I have started to think about cancelling my other online off-site storage provider. With Amazon S3, their costs are so cheap that I am paying about $60-70 per month for about 30GB. This includes the daily uploads of the differential files (between 200MB and 3GB) and full backups of about 26GB. My current provider gives me 500GB for $600 per month. Although this is more space the cost savings is nearly 10 fold since with Amazon I only pay for what I use and I don't use all 500GB.

In summary, I have found that S3 backup is the best program (so far) out there to upload files to S3 without having to create your own. Also a great way to take advantage of Amazon S3's cost savings and data center reliability.