S3 -- cheap storage on the Web

[mdlbear]

This blog post by Jon Udell pointed me at Amazon's S3 -- Simple Storage Service. It's web-accessible, high-bandwidth, high-capacity storage, all you can eat for $0.15/GB/month plus $0.20/GB of data transfer.

What it means for this old hacker is that I could back up my 2.5GB home directory for less than forty cents a months. Probably less, because I'd compress and encrypt it (in that order!) before uploading. I could back up all my track masters for a buck and a half.

There are, obviously, better solutions for distributing music or hosting a website, but I suspect you can't beat Amazon for reliable, comparatively cheap backup of modest quantities of data. Get much above 100GB and you may be better off putting a hard drive in your briefcase and sticking it in your desk drawer at work. (Or, for short term but massively redundant and highly accessible storage you can always encrypt it and post it to Usenet.)