My Documents in the Cloud
I just setup My Documents folder on my computer to automatically backup to Amazon S3 every night. I have kind of been half way doing this as I can, but with a recent laptop failure it became much more of an issue.
I had bought a new el cheapo laptop from Best Buy…and 3 months later the harddrive failed. They were able to recover my data, but there were things that could have been lost forever.
So I am not automatically backing up this data using my secure backup monitor I have installed. It takes all my data and moves it to the Amazon S3 Cloud every night. I also now have a separate backup running which backs up my data to the Mosso Cloud Storage. So:
Plan A – My Documents and Desktop backing up to Amazon S3 Cloud every night.
Plan B – My Documents and Desktop backing up to Mosso (Rackspace) Cloud every night.
Feels pretty good having 3 copies of my data. If my computer fails I am good. And god forbid Amazon should fail….i have another backup.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
It seems like a lot of effort (and therefore time-cost) when you can achieve better with a dedicated backup provider (like Backup Direct, of course). This is still cloud storage – just more focused.
Our service will automatically backup files, and store them in two geographically seperate tier-1 data centres for you.
But it performs three important functions on top: 1) it ensures everything is encrypted in-flight and off-site 2) it only needs to send block-level changes of data including databases, making daily backups last minutes, not hours 3) it keeps a rolling version history of each file for up to 90 days.
This latter point means that a corrupted file (perhaps a database) is not going to be backed up and over-write a clean version in the storage area. This is a critical point for business use – there is no point in having mulitple copies of corrupt data.
In addition, the service allows you to recieve DVD copies of data for bulk restore.
The technology is already used on 3+ million computers so is proven. And ironically, is used by Amazon themselves to protect their own business data!
Brett Raynes
Director
http://www.backupdirect.net