Everyone knows it’s important to backup vital data, but for a business, it’s an absolute necessity. The reality, however, is that despite the imperative, far too few systems are actually archived. Worse, many sites that do create archives store the backups physically adjacent to the live data, either on a separate drive or within the same facility. If disaster strikes, both backups and the original data are both lost. Safety is just one of the many good reasons to keep archives offsite — even if the offsite is your home office or attic.
But don’t start cleaning out your attic yet. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) offers a quick, easy, and frugal way to store data remotely. S3 provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet, and gives you access to the same highly-scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of Web sites. Part of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), the S3 API is simple and flexible.
The first thing to do is head over to http://aws.amazon.com/s3 and sign up for an account. The fees are very reasonable — there’s no sign up fee, storage is $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and bandwidth is just $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. Moreover, the piece-of-mind is invaluable. Once you have an S3 account, you can use the service in any way you’d like:…
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