During the lunch break here at Adobe Engage, I was talking with Jeff Barr about S3 and my slowness to finally get my backup plan in action.
I’ve done endless legwork to figure out what and which remote backup service I need. Implicit there is that I want remote backup. My fear is theft of my laptop — in which case the burglars will probably steal my external hard-drives — or the house burning down — in which case the external hard drives will melt along with the laptop.
With remote backups come the costs of bandwidth and storage. Until Amazon S3, those prices were too high for me. Now, they’re fine. Managing the experience is a difficult thing to sort out to: I need a configure and forget.
The end result is that I fully intend to use JungleDisk as the front-end and scheduler for backing up to S3. The problem is that initial import. I want to backup my music (I cringe at the thought of re-ripping all my CDs, if I still have them and, uh…”acquiring” all those other songs that I can’t seem to find the CDs for), which is a huge chunk. It will take a long, long time to do that initial backup. I don’t know if I can do without the portability of my laptop that long.
So, what I’d like to do is burn a CD and drop it off at, say, the Geek Squad desk Best Buy, and have them put in the time and hassle to do that initial setup. Then, once it’s all up there (all the music!), I can just synch the little changes ongoing.
I’ll even pat upwards for $50 for that service, and probably buy some CDs while I’m there.
(Jeff, by the ways, wins the Looks Most Like His Picture in Person Award.)
Disclaimer: Amazon’s A9 is a client.
The “painful initial backup” is a concern we hear quite a bit. We may offer some kind of mail-in solution in the future, but for most users we think that by refining the backup process to work unobtrusively behind the scenes, the initial backup can be made less painful.
Currently in the software you can set a rate limit (to prevent it from using all your upstream), and it will automatically pick up where it left off if you disconnect – so no need to worry about leaving a laptop idle.
In the future we’d like to add more features, such as rate-limit by time (no limit at night) or usage-based rate limiting (turn down/off backup while you are using the machine). But don’t let that initial upload scare you – for most users it’s over before they know it (even with 10’s of gigs of data).
Coté,
Do what I did… no way was I re-ripping 400+ CDs, so:
Look at your music folder.
Buy external drive that’s bigger.
Copy music to drive.
Unplug drive, take to bank, put in safe deposit box.
Offsite, secure, no upload needed. Covers the “Oh god, I don’t want to have to re-rip most of my music if the laptop and home go” case. Not online, but in the unlikely event that my home and laptop burn up, online access to my music isn’t going to be top of mind…
Dave: thanks for the info. The mail in think would be great!
Rick: now if I only had a bank with a safe deposit box 😉