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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?
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.
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.