Backing It Up – Everything Else
I’m going to take a little break from my recent Macintosh gushing to finish my Backing It Up series of posts. Previously, I discussed the use of Flickr as a way to backup of your photo collection and Gmail as your email backup. This time around I want to discuss a backup strategy for all the other stuff you’ve got floating around in your computer. Flickr and Gmail serve as good single-purpose backup tools, but we need a general solution that will handle everything else.
Remember that we’re talking specifically about online, off-site backup strategies here. Everyone should already have a local backup solution in place. There’s no excuse for not doing this. If you’re not doing backups go right now to CostCo and get yourself an external hard drive — you can get these things in 1TB and 2TB sizes for crazy-cheap prices. With one of these drives you have all sorts of simple options for doing local backups:
- Windows XP and Vista have backup tools included as part of the OS or you can use something like Microsoft’s free SyncToy.
- Macintosh users can use Time Machine or, for the command-line oriented, rsync to get the job done.
So, given that you are already doing local backups, the situation we’re trying to cover here is the catastrophic failure. Even if you’ve got every bit of data redundantly saved on multiple hard drives, these backups aren’t going to do you any good if your house burns down or is burglarized. The best protection against these worst-case scenarios to make sure you’ve got copies of all your important stuff off site.
S3 & JungleDisk
There are plenty of services available today for doing online backup, but the solution that I’ve been using is Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) paired with a desktop tool called Jungle Disk. S3 is nothing more than a big ol’ disk in the cloud — you can have as little or as much storage space as you need and you pay only for what you use. By itself, S3 isn’t particularly useful to the average user since it provides no user interface at all. In order for S3 to really be useful you need a front-end that knows how to talk to the S3 API. This is where Jungle Disk comes in.
Jungle Disk is a utility you install on your local system (Windows, Mac or Linux) which exposes your S3-based storage as if it were a disk connected to your computer. The screenshots below show two of my S3-based disks (named Archive and Backup) as seen by the OS X Finder and Windows Explorer.
Since Jungle Disk makes S3 look like a normal disk to the operating system, you can use all of your standard tools for browsing and managing files. Uploading files to S3 becomes a simple drag-and-drop exercise. This also means that whatever tools you are using to do your local backups can also work with S3. If you have a favorite backup utility you’re already using for your local backups there’s a really good chance it will work with JungleDisk too.
If you don’t have a preferred back up utility, Jungle Disk even has an automatic backup feature baked-in. You can tell it which folders you want backed-up and on what schedule and it will make sure that your stuff gets copied to your S3 account on a regular basis. The screenshot below shows the backup job for the /Users/bdehamer/documents folder on my Mac which runs every day at 1:30am.
As you would expect the backup tool is smart enough to not backup any files which haven’t changed since the last backup. It will even maintain multiple versions of files and backup files which are currently open or locked by another application — for me, this comes in really handy for things like my Outlook .pst file since I never close Outlook on my work PC.
Cost
Alright, so what’s all this cost? Jungle Disk has two payment options: you can pay either $2 per month or a one-time $20 charge. Either option includes free lifetime upgrades and you can install the software on as many machines as you want. Not surprisingly, the JungleDisk site tries to push the $2 monthly subscription — the perpetual license option is kind of hidden, but you can find it here (this is the option I went with and the one that I recommend for others).
One thing to note is that the $2/month plan includes some features that don’t come standard with the one-time, $20 license. The monthly subscription gives you web browser access to your files and block-level file updates. The browser access I guess would be handy if you needed to access your files from a machine which didn’t have the JungleDisk client installed. The ability to do block-level file updates means that you only have to upload the changed portion of any large file. Imagine you have a 1GB Outlook .pst file that you backup regularly but only a small portion of that file actually changes on a day-to-day basis. The ability to do block-level updates means that you don’t have to upload the entire 1GB file every time that you back it up.
Just to make the JungleDisk pricing a bit more complicated you also have the option to add the web access and block-level update features to the $20 option via a $1/month subscription fee. Assuming that you use the tool for at least 20 months, this route is still a better deal than the $2/month subscription for those people who want the extra features.
The other component of the cost is the Amazon S3 service where you pay for both storage and data transfer. Storage is priced at 15 cents per GB per month — if you store 50GB of data on S3 it will cost you $7.50 per month. Additionally, you pay 10 cents per GB of uploaded data — this means that it will cost you $5 to upload that same 50GB of data to S3 (if you’re regularly backing up large files that contain small changes this is where the block-level update feature of JungleDisk may pay for itself). I found that my largest bill was the first month that I started using the service since I was uploading a lot of data and having to pay for both data transfer and storage. After that first month though, the data transfer costs were negligible as I was only uploading a handful of new/updated files. I’m currently storing around 30GB of data on S3 and my monthly bill is just about $5.
Note that the data transfer costs for downloads are quite a bit more than for the uploads (17 cents per GB vs 10 cents per GB). However, if you are using this mainly as a backup solution you’re probably only downloading data in the event that you need to recover from some local data loss. Hopefully this isn’t a common occurrence, but it’s still an important factor to consider.
Between April 1, 2009 and June 30, 2009 Amazon is running a special promotion where the data transfer cost for file uploads is only 3 cents per GB (instead of the usual 10 cents). If you’re thinking about getting started with S3, now is a great time to do it since you’ll save a lot on your upfront data transfer — that 50GB of data you have is only going to cost you $1.50 to upload instead of $5
Alternatives
The online backup market is a pretty crowded one. Beyond S3/JungleDisk, you can choose from the likes of Mozy, Carbonite, iDrive and many others. I would caution you against simply selecting the cheapest option — spend some time up front thinking about how you want to interact with the service. I used Mozy for about a year but I ultimately gave up on it because it just wasn’t flexible enough:
- Initially, the $4.95/month price for Mozy’s unlimited backup seemed like a really good deal. But when you consider that you pay $4.95 per computer per month it can get really expensive. Currently, I’m using JungleDisk on 4 different machines with my one-time $20 license. On two of those machines I’m only backing up a few hundred megabytes of data — the S3 costs for that storage is literally pennies per month. With Mozy I’d be paying almost $20/month regardless of my storage utilization.
- With Mozy, you must use their tool for any backup/restore activity. No drag-n-drop access. No choice of backup software.
- Mozy is a backup service, not a storage service. This means that everything you upload to Mozy must also continue to reside on your local machine. If Mozy sees that you have deleted a file from your local machine it will, after a certain period of time, also remove it from your backup. This isn’t an issue with S3 — if you want to copy a bunch of files to S3 specifically so that you don’t have to keep a local copy anymore you can absolutely do that.
- Every time that I would reinstall the OS on one of my machines Mozy would think that I was trying to add a new system to my account and force me to re-upload all of the data that I’d already backed-up. This was a huge FAIL for someone like me who repaves his machines on a fairly regular basis.
I don’t mean to pick on Mozy here (it’s probably a good solution for a lot of people), but you should definitely think about your specific needs before you select a solution. For me, S3 and JungleDisk is the perfect combination.
One Response to “Backing It Up – Everything Else”
There is a new kid on the block – online backup product that will come out later this month called CloudBerryDrive. It will be powered by amazon S3 reliable and cost efficient storage. If you want to take part in early beta and perhaps get a discount later sign up on the website What safer place to keep your files than Amazon’s servers?
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