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PostPosted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 3:43 pm 
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Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:50 pm
Posts: 1013
Location: Los Angeles
Hi all,
I just wanted to mention that if you have data that you absolutely, positively do not want to lose to a hard drive failure, fire or natural disaster, you may want to consider an online backup service. I know that some of you may have looked around at it before and saw that it can be very expensive, even for a relatively small amount of data.

I recently found Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (aka S3) that has very reasonable rates. There are fees for transferring in, transferring out and storing the data, but they're charging just pennies (US). As an example, earlier this month, I transferred in 3.1 GB of digital photos that I'd never want to lose. My charge for the month... US $0.49 Everything is pro-rated based on "byte-hours" so my cost will probably be a little more next month, but certainly less than US $1.00 Here's the breakout for my current chages:
    Amazon Simple Storage Service
    View/Edit Service
    $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used 0.933 GB-Mo 0.14
    $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in 3.109 GB 0.31
    $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out 0.000 GB 0.01
    $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests 3219 Requests 0.03
    View Usage Report 0.49
    Taxes
    Estimated Taxes
    (Due December 1, 2007)
    0.00
    Charges due on December 1, 2007† 0.49


That amounts to almost nothing for that piece of mind. There are many 3rd party apps that you can use to interface with the S3 service, or you can roll your own. (Try googling for Amazon S3). I'm using some ruby commands that I found and incorporated them into some very simple bash scipts to upload my photos.

I am in no way affiliated with Amazon.com or their web services. I'm just a happy customer.

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 6:15 am 
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Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2006 1:03 pm
Posts: 240
Location: Shakopee, MN USA
Thanks for providing this link. I signed up for the service. My wife and I were recently talking about backing up our photos to DVD-R's and storing them into a fire safe box. The idea of using this service seems even better. I currently have our digital photos backed up on 3 different computers at home.


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 11:15 am 
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Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2006 1:03 pm
Posts: 240
Location: Shakopee, MN USA
Here is a Firefox extension for Amazon's S3 service:

http://www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 12:33 pm 
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Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2004 12:26 pm
Posts: 468
Location: Canada
Considering I've lost all my photos once ... this would have been great to have a few years ago.

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 5:00 pm 
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Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:50 pm
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Location: Los Angeles
novellahub wrote:
Here is a Firefox extension for Amazon's S3 service:

http://www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php


That looks pretty nice. I'll check it out. Thank you for sharing that link! :D

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PostPosted: Sat Dec 01, 2007 11:49 pm 
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Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:50 pm
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Location: Los Angeles
novellahub wrote:
Here is a Firefox extension for Amazon's S3 service:

http://www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php


So, I finally had a chance to take a look at this. It is very cool, but it seems very sluggish on my desktop machine (which is idle other than iceweasel/firefox running). Did you have the same problem?

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 9:39 am 
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Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2006 1:03 pm
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Location: Shakopee, MN USA
I am having issues using it as well. It keeps saying I don't have a account created in the plugin. I assume the account name is my email address.


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PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 12:47 pm 
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Location: Los Angeles
novellahub wrote:
I am having issues using it as well. It keeps saying I don't have a account created in the plugin. I assume the account name is my email address.


Here's what I did after I had already established an S3 account on the S3 web page (Amazon Web Services Account):
    Installed the S3 plugin
    Launched the plugin (Tools --> S3 Organizer)
    Added my account info using the "Manage Accounts" tab (Account name = some descriptive name that I can easily identify. Access key & Secret key: From the S3 AWS Access Identifiers section of your webservices account.)

Since I already had a "bucket" created from my earlier transfer with the ruby scripts, I could see it and could transfer a small file to it. Keep in mind when you create a "bucket" it has to be a unique name that no one else has chosen. Your data is stored in one big mish-mash storage location, not as a sub directory of your account (i.e. not /home/your-user-name). It's more like /amazon/s3/public/your-bucket-name. Does that help?

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 7:59 pm 
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Location: Shakopee, MN USA
I guess I just had to wait a bit longer for my Amazon S3 account. I had to re-register again for some reason. I did not use the account for a few days and I guess they must remove some inactive accounts. I am uploading some pictures right now and it seems similar to a FTP transfer upload speed. Now that it has gone through a few pictures, it has slowed down to one picture uploaded every 5 seconds. This is on a Windows XP Pro Laptop.


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PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 11:04 pm 
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Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:50 pm
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Location: Los Angeles
novellahub wrote:
I guess I just had to wait a bit longer for my Amazon S3 account. I had to re-register again for some reason. I did not use the account for a few days and I guess they must remove some inactive accounts. I am uploading some pictures right now and it seems similar to a FTP transfer upload speed. Now that it has gone through a few pictures, it has slowed down to one picture uploaded every 5 seconds. This is on a Windows XP Pro Laptop.


Good deal. Glad you got it working. You're limited to your regular ISP capped upload speed.

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