Backing up data using Amazon S3

For years I have spend hours organizing and backing up all the pictures I took. At first I received digital cd’s because I had an analog camera, recent years I have a digital camera.

I don’t have a RAID configuration, I do have over 1.5 TB of hard disks, and I spread the photo’s across several. It’s not super secure, since all disks are connected to the same computer…

This week I stumbled across jungledisk, a frontend tool for the Amazon S3 webservices. The S3 provides data storages for 0.15$ per GB per month. This is far cheaper then any home made backup system, I’m sure.

Jungledisk provide a mount point (Win,Linux and Mac!) that contains your space on the S3. Whatever you copy onto it, will be cached and uploaded in the background. So it seems very fast. Files are cached locally so you don’t need to retrieve it from the webservice every time.

Now I’m confident my data is stored safely, without a hassle. I’m happy to pay for such a great service.