The combination of parental leave, a Sony A100 10 Mpix camera and the 80 Gb HD of my Mac mini server has resulted in a lot of zeroes and ones needing a place to live. I have realized that a lof of valuable photos are only stored on the HD. Should it fail the family will be really disappointed. Hence, the need for a backup solution.
I was planning to get a small RAID solution for the home network, but they are fairly expensive, need electricity and space. So, I had a look at the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). If you haven’t heard of S3 before:
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.
I was expecting S3 to be fairly expensive with the redundancy and all, but it turns out that it is cheap. Really cheap. To calculate what it would cost me to backup my iPhoto library I threw together an iPhoto backup to S3 calculator.
Turns out that starting with 2000 photos at around 2 megs each, adding 100 photos each month willcost me $10/year. Hard to beat if you are trying to build your own RAID solution.
Backup software
Here is the setup I use. I tried some of the S3 client libraries available, but the only one that was persistent enough to do the initial 2000 file sync was jets3t. It is a java library that comes with some easy to use command line synchronization scripts. After setting up jets3t with your S3 API key, all you do is tell the synchronize script to check your iPhoto folder.
Currently, I run it as a scheduled job once a month, but depending on your photography habits you may want to trigger it differently. It works like a charm and last month’s bill from Amazon was $1.23.
Try the calculator and see what your cost would be.