Backing Up Our Future

Steve had another one of his brilliant ideas. I was talking about backing stuff up and he suggested Amazon S3. and I never even thought of it as an option - and its a great idea. No upfront cost, no maintenance of a server, no power or Internet concerns - just push the files to S3 and write a couple scripts to keep them up to date. its elegant. and at the end of the day assuming we don't use that much space (after-all we really don't have that much data) it doesn't cost us hardly anything at all. So I spent a bit of time today setting up an account and pushing the first couple files up, and it all went pretty painless. They have a very sensible key-value pair system setup to do the storage, you just create a bucket and then store a bunch of files (values) to objects (keys) in the bucket, and volia. Mike is currently on the job of writing a couple scripts to sync things like the mysql db and some of the repo stuff, and we need to figure out how much of our pcs to backup, but otherwise its ranking in as a pretty brilliant idea so far! Amazon S3:

• Setup account: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
• AWS perl tool: http://timkay.com/aws/
• Find your keys under account info and create a ~/.awssecret file
• Run s3ls, s3put bucket_name, aws put bucketname/object_name file