I woke up this morning in a cold sweat. “Why?,” you ask unnecessarily (because I am going to tell you).

Why? Because I have 37GB of photos from the last 6 years on my computer and when I boot it on a cold day it makes a noise like the hard drive heads are about to fall off the servo postiony thingo.

“But, don’t you have backups Ash?,” you continue, annoying me with your constant questions. The reason I don’t currently have backups of our photos is because I don’t have enough space, even on the ~750GB of HD space in my current machine to mirror the photos *and* all my current projects. Of course I could buy another HD but even with mirroring that seems lame to me (I currently mirror all of my projects between drives). I am a futurist and there needs to be a futuristic solution to this. Preferably one that allows me to recover my data even if my house burns down.

I was going to continue pretending you are talking to me but I can’t be bothered so instead I’ll just get to the point. To solve my problem I have started using the Amazon S3 service + JungleDisk to backup all of my photos (and everything else eventually) to the cloud.

In case you have been living under a rock in space, cloud computing is the best thing since sliced cheese and twice as awesome. Using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) I now have an ultra reliable infinite sized network disk to store my files on. To backup my data I am using JungleDisk which makes the S3 service appear as a network drive on my computer. From there I can drag files into S3 or schedule an automated backup.

All this awesome isn’t free of course but it is cheap and the cost depends entirely on how much you use. It costs about 10c US per GB put data into it and uploading my entire photo archive of 37GB is going to cost me approx $6 US per month to store. Which is a freaking bargain when you think of each of the options available.

>> Buy another disk and put it in my pc

The disk will be about $120 (possibly less) for 500GB. I need to install it somewhere. I need to mirror to it. When my computer catches on fire it’s all gone. I can’t access it from anywhere else easily (at high speed).

>> Buy another computer and put some disks in there and start backing up to that

Same as above but it costs more.

>> Use S3

Slower to back up to (as its on the net). Monthly cost depending on how much you store. If my computer catches on fire I simply download it again from the net. I can access it from any computer like it was a local drive (using JungleDisk). S3 is so multiply redundant that I will never lose my data unless I purposefully delete it. It’s in the cloud man!!! (Ok, yes I am a trend whore but hey what you gonna do?)

So I went with S3 because if you are gonna do something do it properly and if you are gonna do backups do them really properly. JungleDisk also has a USB version so I can mount a network disk to my stuff really quickly from my USB drive which is cool.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted as to how it works out. The only issue is upload speed at the moment but that will become irrelevant once most of my data is actually up there.