Amazon S3 is Amazon’s cloud storage service. At .15 per gigabyte, 50GB will cost me $7.50 a month, versus $20 for Dropbox or UbuntuOne. And odds are those services are planting your data on Amazon servers anyway! It’s a damn good deal for redundant storage. Both of these services give you 2 GB for free, so if you just want to back up some documents and spreadsheets the free options should work well for you. There are a variety of tools that will streamline the process, Jungledisk probably being the most popular. However, Jungledisk does cost an extra $3 a month, and creates a cached copy of what you store, so in effect it’ll eat up a lot of local disk space unnecessarily, as the local data already lives on my media sever.

A GUI just seemed to add overhead I didn’t need to deal with.Then I found s3cmd, an open source command line tool for Linux. Win!!! It can do an Rsync with Amazon, but again, not really necessary. My MP3 library is not dynamic. I add on average 1 album a month, So I’m copying my music and photo library up to Amazon, one directory at a time, in the background as I do other stuff on the laptop. This also gives me an opportunity to decide if some of the music on my server is really worth keeping. Once I get the photos and music up, I probably will set up rsync with my docs directory. I already back up the media server to Breck’s PC, so the Amazon files are triple redundant.

However you do it, make sure you are backing up everything important.