I started using a MacBook Pro a week or so ago, and in the process of getting it setup for "commercial use" I needed to load it up with a bunch of different software. One of the things I was looking for was a decent backup solution that would give me quick recovery in a worst case scenario. With my Thinkpad, I had been using a USB drive. Somehow while looking for OS/X backup software, I came across software that would allow me to mount Amazon's S3 with my MacBook and backup directly to that. The price and convenience of this are amazing. $.15 per gb used, and my data lives in the cloud, meaning that even if you kipe my notebook from me in an internet cafe halfway around the world, recovering my data just means tapping into the internet cloud and dragging it all down.

Very cool, very convenient.

On the train back to Toronto, I've got some time to get caught up on my RSS feeds, and I noticed that other people are starting to think the same way. Neat.

This got me to thinking about what this means in a commercial context - i.e. where might we start using S3 in the context of Tucows business. Which lead me to start thinking about whether it was economical for us to do so. I realize that I had no clue what network attached storage was going for nowadays, but a quick consultation with my good friend Google, which lead me to Dell, got me a decent idea pretty quickly.

A Dell Poweredge 2950 with approximately 2 terabytes of storage will cost approximately $4k US, I wondered how much a similar configuration would cost me via S3 - the answer, roughly $300 per month. That means I could use S3 for about a year before I was paying too much for it. Maybe a little bit longer considering I wouldn't be actually using a full 2tb on day one, so I wouldn't have to pay for the extra storage until I used it, but also maybe a little shorter because with S3 I would have to pay for data transfer costs.

This is pretty amazing. Under a lot of circumstances, it is probably more economical for businesses to use S3 for nearline data storage than it is for them to invest in physical infrastructure and manage it themselves. Especially when one takes into account the total cost of ownership, i.e. network bandwidth, HR costs, etc. - none of which I figured into my quick cost calculations.

I've got approximately 100gb of digital media at home that I would like to have backed up better than I do know - music, movies and photos. Now I can seriously reconsider building out my array of USB drives anymore than I already have and start investing in S3 as a long term solution to my backup needs. I really hate paying a monthly fee for stuff like this, but in this case, the cost calculations really work out in my favor - $15 per month for out-of-sight disaster recovery? I don't know if it gets better than that.

Updated: Jeremy Z. has a way deeper cost analysis comparing S3 with other solutions that I missed in my first read of the article I linked to. Definitely worth checking out. I wish I had earlier. Would have saved me writing this post! :)