Library Web Chic

Last weekend my external hard drive decided to go on the fritz. Under normal circumstances this is a bad thing. My external hard drive has all my MP3s and photos on it and losing those would be very bad. However, with my month being as insane as it is, I have very little time to deal with this sort of thing. So this was bordering on catastrophic. Luckily my husband is a geek as well and saved the day by spending a couple of hours and fixing the issue.

Once he’d recovered by files I decided that once and for all, I needed a reliable off site backup mechanism. Partial because I don’t want to lose my stuff due to hardware failure, but also because I live in hurricane-land and heaven forbid I should have to flee without taking my backup hard drives with me.

After looking around I decided that Amazon’s S3 was my best option. The only trouble is. S3 doesn’t come with a way to upload and download files. So I went looking for a potential solution to the problem. Luckily there are actually several out there. I decided to use something called JungleDisk which mounts your Amazon S3 account as a drive and allow you to drag and drop files to it. Because it is a mounted drive, it also can be used with rsync, which is what I traditionally use to create my backups.

The task of creating the first set of backups is painful because it means uploading all of my files; a process that is taking me an extended period of time. But once the files are uploaded incremental backup will be must easier.

Plus on Wednesday I discovered another advantage of this system. If I only have my laptop while I’m on the rode I can still get to my archived files. This has the potential of being really handy when I’m on the road and want to show someone my photos or an old presentation or something.

Overall I’m thrilled with my decision so far, but only time will tell if this is truly an effective method of backing up my files.