There are many old sayings that are nonetheless very true and bear repeating. For instance, “A stitch in time saves nine.” Yup. Very accurate. And” The early bird gets the worm.” Absolutely true. And then there is this chestnut, ignored by both Napoleon and Hitler, to their ultimate chagrin: “Never attempt a land invasion of Russia.”
Another maxim applies to the readers of Linux Magazine, one that you may ignore to your peril: “There are two kinds of computer users: those who have had catastrophic hard drive failures and those who will.” Want to make sure that when disaster strikes you’re protected? That your important data is safeguarded? Then read on!
To start with, look at Amazon, which is more than just a great place to buy books, CD’s, DVD’s, and gardening equipment, among other wares. It’s also a powerhouse of innovation in network services, and one of the coolest new services is S3, or Simple Storage Service. Launched in March 2006, S3 is Internet-based storage, but at prices that are so low that you can just picture Jeff Bezos in a plaid suit shouting, “Our prices are crazy insane! Low, low, low! If they were any lower, our shareholders would sue!”
So how cheap is S3? How does $0.15 per gigabyte per month of storage used, and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred per month sound? If you store 2 GB of files, and transfer all of that in a month, you’re paying $0.30 for storage and $0.40 for…
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