Our backup solution: Amazon S3
Over a week and no post, I guess you will all want to know what we have been up to! Well last week the British Summer finally came (and went) so we were catching a few rays. We have also been working hard as well to add a few new features including suggested replies, attach other files and the brand new design that James showed in the last post!
This post isn’t about any of that though, this is about our backup solution (for now) which uses Amazon S3. Every night (around 2 in the morning) we have a nice little shell script that runs that backs everything up and stores it on S3. It is powered by some not-so-fancy Bash scripting and the Amazon S3 PHP Toolkit (phps3tk). It is nothing fancy - it doesn’t even delete old files so we have to do that manually. This isn’t really a problem though, and it gets the job done!
Anyway, I guess you will want to know how much this all cost? Well as we were backing up a mighty 30mb per day and it was running for half a month it was rather expensive. A grand 5p - yep 5 pence, or for you Yanks 11 cents!
There was also a hefty 1c tax….
We are happy with this, it is a nice reliable solution at a very cheap rate! One thing that may put some people off is that Amazon don’t provide any guarantees that data stored is safe. You get what you pay for though, if you want a guarantee your data is safe expect to pay a lot more!
You should try using Jetset ? .. Synchronize tool in the free library has a script which if put in a cron can synchronize your local and S3 account. Cockpit is also a great tool to use.
Comment by ding dong — 14th of August, 2007 @ 10:40 pm
That looks cool, here is a link if anyone is interested: http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/
At first when I read your comment I was a bit warry about Synchronise. We compress everything which brings it down from about 150mb to 30mb so I had concerns over disk space usage, but it turns out Synchronise supports compression as well as encryption.
As for Cockpit it looks similar to what we are using already, Salsa, an AIR app: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/sample_apps/b1/Salsa.air
Comment by Luca — 16th of August, 2007 @ 12:12 am