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Amazon's New Storage Service
dlaur writes to tell us that today Amazon announced their Simple Storage Service (S3) allowing users to store unlimited amounts of data at $0.15 per GB paid monthly. From the article: "S3 was purportedly built to support both Amazon's own internal applications and the external users of the Amazon Web Services platform. That should be proper motivation to build a service that's fast and robust enough for mission critical use, yet flexible enough to support any storage task thrown at it."
Upload truecrypt files
Open source, cross-platform, creates a strongly encrypted file that the program can mount as a real HD, you can mount it on any platform, does transparent encryption (for example in WinXP, it mounts itself with a drive letter, you can throw stuff in directly just as if it were a real drive, and it encrypts as it goes in)
http://www.truecrypt.org/
You can do it in say N meg chunks or something, I guess you'd have to create a new truecrypt partition every time, but I don't really know much about it, just tried it out and it seems neat
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
While $0.15/Gb/month is reasonable, the poster fails to mention Amazon will also charge $0.20/Gb on transfer. So while you will pay $15/month for your 100 Gb pr0n collection, you will also pay $20 to upload it, and a further $20 to download the whole lot to your cube-buddy's computer.
From TFA: "Apart from the storage fee, you pay $0.20 per gigabyte transferred, but there are no minimum fees and no setup costs, so you pay as you go."
Still, not bad - but the economics for the home user are a little less ideal than first reported.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
you could. But not everyone wants to back up 200GB worth of data.
I have my backups categorized as follows:
High priority (documents, records, etc): 150MB
Medium priority (digital pictures, code, etc): 8GB
Low priority (movies, mp3, etc): 430GB
The first gets backup up nightly to a remote machine, as well as weekly dumps to CDs
The second is rsync'ed nightly to my website (not my machine -- shared hosting)
The third gets a RAID5 array, but that's it
For the first (and maybe the second) category, Amazon would be much more economical than doing it myself onto another, designated, disk.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I wonder if this reliance on third-party systems comes at a cost, perhaps to reliability or security?
If you don't do it right, oh, yes, very much yes. There are n-thousand different components along the link from your business to Amazon's datacenters. All it takes is one backhoe to cut a fibre and your company has gone dark, or one errant line of code and you're spewing critical customer data in the clear.
Do it right, though, and you can increase reliability and security. Use S3 as a backup for your small business that needs a bit of off site store. Put network monitoring in place to watch for those silly mistakes so you can fix it before it becomes a major embarrasment.
It will be interesting when Google's GDrive comes on line -- then you can be redundant across providers (RAID = Redundant Array of Independent Datacenters?).
Not with any of the recent tape formats. They're all "serpentine" - That is, a very narrow track (up to 1/512 of the width of the tape) goes from the start to the end of the tape. The head then moves down a fraction, and writes the next track "backwards".
This means that the seek time is reduced by up to 512x. Of course, this isn't free - Tape wear is increased since there are many, many more passes over the tape.
Apparently all the objects you create in their 'buckets' are encrypted and secure from everyone. So, fine with that.
I would like to see them implement rsync to get data to them, but as its primarily a data-storage service, and not a backup-service (ie its for your web app to hold and access data, not to dump nightly backups on), I doubt we'll see rsync ever, especially as rsync does require CPU time which I bet they have little of in comparison to the vast amounts of storage space.
Google are apparently working on a simialr storage system, so we'll have to see what they come up with. If you want backups.. bqinternet are very popular, and support rsync, and is roughly the same price as Amazon once you start storing a certain amount.
Duplicity is open source, gpg encrypts data before sending it, and uses rsync style algorithms to ensure it only transmits changed deltas.
If you follow this link, you'll notice that they are supporting bit torrent.
Consider.
If by "cross platform," you mean "Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux."
Call me back when it runs on OS X.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Oops. Left out the important part of the quote. It should have said:
2) The limitation of 1 call/per second/per IP address set forth in Section 1.A.2 above is not applicable to your use of Amazon S3. You may not, however, store "objects" (as described in the user documentation) that contain more than 5 Gigabytes of data, or own more than 100 "buckets" (as described in the user documentation) at any one time.
This is true.
Actually on a Mac what you can do is make a free-floating encrypted Sparse image. It's the same way that the OS handles FileVault encrypted home folders. It's superior to just making an encrypted DMG, because it's readable and writable like a regular filesystem, plus it can expand and contract depending on what's stored in it.
It doesn't have the steganographic or deniability benefits of Truecrypt, but it's good encrypted storage. (Plus if you're ultra-paranoid you can put it inside your FileVault encrypted home folder, so that the data on disk is encrypted twice.) Plus I don't think you need to be an Administrator to do it, so it could be useful if you only have a user account on a system and don't trust the person with the master password.
The only "trick" is that Disk Copy will not make one, you need to do it from the Terminal with hdiutil.
% hdiutil create SecureSparse -size 5g -encryption -type SPARSE -fs HFS+ -volname SecureImage
Where "SecureImage" is the name of the file you want to create and 5GB is the maximum size (which is not necessarily the space it will take on disk).
There are a few caveats though. You can't share it with someone who doesn't have a Mac, hdiutil is not open source and there is not to my knowledge a Linux version, and I'm not sure what happens if you try to copy it to a FAT filesystem and back. I've copied one to a Linux fileserver (EXT2) and back and it seemed to survive okay, but I have always been told to use caution when moving sparse files around.
(I originally learned about this procedure from this page, so all credit to them.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."