Using Amazon S3 to back up or store your files

How much would you pay if you had to buy back what’s on your computer hard drive when the computer crashes?   If you keep 20 GB of music and other things like memorable pictures, or videos of your already grown up children etc. probably you will be willing to shell out a few hundred bucks, if not thousands, I would say that is priceless.

The problem is   that computer hard disks are not reliable, the computer could be perfectly working today, but it will greet you with a black screen tomorrow saying that the hard drive cannot be found. To add reliability to your important data you need to store it in multiple places, it can be other computer hard drives, external hard disks, and in this case, in cheap storage online services like Amazon S3   (Amazon Web Services)

I have used Amazon S3 many times to store media files and their service is great. the ease of use and the concept of using “Buckets” that can hold unlimited objects or files make this service rather unique. When you create an account with amazon s3 you can specify where you want your files to get stored, either in the US or Europe, there is no centralized location for your files once they are on Amazon datacenter, they get spread out all over to ensure availability.

Most convenient of all are the prices:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

That is, they charge you .15 cents for each GB of storage used. if you store 20 GB of data you will be paying 3 dollars a month. for data transfer, they charge you .10 cents for GB that is, if   you upload 20 GB of data to their datacenter you will pay 2 dollars.

Now, if you want to stream those files, or make them available for download, you will pay 18 cents for each 1 GB streamed that is, if you make an album of 60 MB available for download and gets downloaded a 100 times, you will pay 6 dollars. Not bad, compared to other services and remember if you are using the service just to store your files, the costs will be almost free.

One of the drawbacks I experienced when first signing up for the service was the lack of Interface, a direct way of creating buckets and objects to store the files, but after a small research I stumbled upon a cool firefox plugin that does the work pretty good. You can find the plugin here. you can find a great tutorial on how to use and store files in amazon s3 here

There you have it, you can have your entire music collection stored on Amazon S3 almost free !