How to use Amazon S3 to back up your data

Hi there,

My friends are telling me that Amazon S3 is a great place to back up. It sounds great. It's run by a big company, they've been around a while that sounds very trustworthy and lots of big companies store critical data there. I've looked at their site though and I'm a bit confused. How can I back up there?

Jenny, Columbus, Ohio

Answer

Hi Jenny,

Yes, you can, but you must use third party backup software that uses Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 is a very simple service (which is partly why it is so good at what it does). It's an online storage service, and while some storage services are backup services as well, Amazon isn't. It's just a server with an API which lets you store data.

What does this mean?

There is no Amazon software that you can run on your computer which will do any of the following:

Recognize which files you want to back up.
Schedule transfers and transfer them
Throttle transfers
Detect file changes and back up only the difference.
Encrypt any transfers

...or anything else. There is only a server with an API that lets you store data - any kind of data, for any purpose. Amazon does, however, provide world class storage. They have designed it with the aim of providing high availability, low latency and failure resistant storage. This gives you greater backup and restore speeds as well as greater confidence that your data is safe. As far as it is possible to tell, no customer using Amazon S3 has yet lost any data.

What's the downside?

It's expensive relative to other storage solutions and you may not need the extra reliability, high availability or low latency you are paying for. The added risk to your data of using lower reliability and lower availability storage is very small compared to not backing up at all - even if it fails, for you to lose data it still has to fail at the same time as you suffering your own data loss.

Is there anything cheaper?

Yes, there is a wide variety of online backup services cheaper than Amazon S3. Unless you are storing more than 500TB of data, it costs ~$0.14 per gb month to store your data. It also costs an added $0.15 per gb uploaded. Assuming your data has an average lifetime of 1 year, this means that anything that lets you store data for under $0.15 per gb per month will likely be cheaper.

If you want to have your back up questions answered too, just send me a quick note.