The Economics of Using Amazon S3 as a Backup Server for Your Home PC

By Alexander Grundner | October 6th, 2006 (2) Comments

UPDATED – Jeremy Zawodny has posted an amusing article comparing the costs involved in putting together and maintaining your own dedicated, in-home file server over using a third party service like Amazon S3 for backups. For those unfamiliar with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon sells it enterprise grade, redundant online storage capacity to anyone for $0.15 per GB a month and charges an additional $0.20 per GB to download it back. As with all things technology related – especially storage – Amazon’s costs to users will most likely continue to drop as time goes on. Anyways, to make a long story short, Jeremy found that he would save $587 over five years if he went with Amazon instead of building a PC, maintaining it, and paying electricity costs to keep it powered on 24/7.

My thoughts:
S3, at first glance, might look attractive because of its pay-only-for-what-you-consume model, but it’s important to note that there aren’t any apps available to general PC users that can easily tap into the service (at least not yet). The other option to take into consideration that wasn’t mentioned (among others) is just paying a web hosting service to fulfill the same tasks. Dreamhost, for example, charges $9.95 a month and offers 200GB of storage (increases by 1GB/mo. at no charge) with a bandwidth limit of 2TB a month (increases by 16GB/mo. at no charge) which can then be accessed via SSH and FTP. Note: The same amount of storage (200GB) would cost you $30/mo. — not including any download charges — using Amazon S3.

Another thing to think about (especially for our eHomeUpgrade readers) is that if you are planning on streaming your media content at home, replacing a central file server doesn’t make much sense – unless you’re planning on storing/accessing all you media on various PCs around the house. For us, we’re better off using a NAS and then backing up any files from our desktop to a third party service for added protection. If you’re interested in other services tailored to meet desktop users’ needs, have a look at Techcrunch’s online storage service roundup (worth a look: Box.net, Mediamax, Xdrive). And then there’s always the free Firefox Gmail extension hack for quick file storage called Gmail Space (max 2GB).

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UPDATE (10/9): It looks like Jeremy did a little digging and found the following apps for use with S3 (some easier than others): s3sync.rb, Backup Manager, s3DAV, S3 Backup, duplicity, S3 Solutions, Brackup, Jungle Disk.

Personally, I think Jungle Disk looks like the easiest one of the bunch to use for the normal desktop user — bonus: it’s available for Windows/Mac/Linux.

UPDATE 2: I did a little search in the S3 developer forums and it looks like WebDAV is not included in the S3 API currently. Adding WebDAV would change things significantly in getting general file managment apps talking to the service, as well as, providing a method to mount S3′s storage as a network drive — when this happens, I’ve got a how-to ready to go :).

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