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Long-Term Personal Data Storage?
BeanBagKing writes "Yesterday I set out in search of a way to store my documents, videos, and pictures for a long time without worrying about them. This is stuff that I may not care about for years, I don't care where it is, or if it's immediately available, so long as when I do decide to get it, it's there. What did I come up with? Nothing. Hard Drives can fail or degrade. CD's and DVD's I've read have the same problem over long periods of time. I'd rather not pay yearly rent on a server or backup/storage solution. I could start my own server, but that goes back to the issue of hard drives failing, not to mention cost. Tape backups aren't common for personal backups, making far-future retrieval possibly difficult, not to mention the low storage capacity of tape drives. I've thought about buying a bunch of 4GB thumb drives; I've had some of those for years and even sent a few through washers and driers and had the data survive. Do you have any suggestions? My requirements are simple: It must be stable, lasting for decades if possible, and must be as inexpensive as possible. I'm not looking to start my own national archive; I have less than 500GBs and only save things important to me."
Its not really that cheap, and not that simple to use for personal backups. Unless you are willing to write your own backup scripts, its going to be a headache.
Querying S3 for a list of stored files is *very* slow, and you only get 1k results per query. This means you have to index what files you put in S3 in a local db. This allows you to ask the db what files are there (and how to grab them).
If you only have a few files you can use the S3 browser extension for Firefox (or one of a many file system mounting, ftp simulating, etc tools). Just keep in mind the 1k file limit per query and box things in folders of no more than 1k items. Otherwise you will have a very slow browsing experience.
I have around 120 GB of family photos and purchased mp3s that I would like to store. To store 120 GB at .15 per gigabyte/month for 1 year would cost me: $216 (at $18 a month).
We use it where I work, with great success, but it would be much to much work for me for a personal backup system.
Considering the cost, I would go with a consumer targeted app (there are LOTS of them). A number of them charge a flat flee for "unlimited" storage. Beware of how you interface them. Some support windows only.
Try Jungle Disk http://www.jungledisk.com/ . It makes S3 easy to use...
I prefer punch cards, but you've got to watch out for those pregnant chads.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Jungle Disk is also very useful for S3. Allows you to mount drives in Windows, Linux or OSX. You have to pay, but only once per S3 account (so can use on multiple machines).
But as you say, it's too expensive for personal use once you hit the hundreds of Gigs. I'm sure it'll come down over time, but the reality is it's just expensive to store things online.
I really think the best solution is to use external HDDs (or even internal since he's not worried about access). Failure is a possibility, but they're pretty cheap, so just buy two and back it up twice.