How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Web

Okay, so here's something I've worried about: My photos. I work with computers enough to know that catastrophic hard drive failure happens, and happens regularly. Most of the stuff I have on my iMac at home isn't that critical. Yes, I have a lot of programs, but I also have my license keys stored online and I can retrieve them and re-install them at will. No big deal. And yes, I have some documents that I wouldn't want to lose, but documents are small and, once again, I have them backed up to a server online (okay, I have a .Mac Mobile Me account. Sue me.) so that's not a big problem. And even if I lose all my documents, It's once again not a big deal.

The problem is the one irreplaceable directory on my computer: the one full of those pictures we have of our kids at birth, their first camping trip, etc. No matter what I do, I can't re-create these pictures if they're lost.
So like a good Mac user I bought an external hard drive when I bought Leopard, and Presto! Instant Time Machine! Now if my computer hard drive dies, I still have all the pictures. I'm safe!
But... What about, say, a fire? Or a thief that spends the time digging my Time Machine disk out of the place I hid it? Or a really odd power surge? Or rabid hard-drive eating weasels?

So once again I had a problem that was keeping me awake at nights. Not for long, mind you, just a few seconds; just a small bit of psychic baggage on my soul. I considered buying a bunch of DVDs to make periodic backups, but that gets expensive in a hurry, because if you want to be sure your data is safe you need to use DVD+R, not DVD+RW.

Then I thought about getting a second external hard drive, doing monthly backups to that, then putting it in a safe place offsite somewhere, but that's a huge pain in the backside, so I probably wouldn't do it very religiously. Also, what if your house burns down when you have the offsite backup hard drive in the house? Now you're hosed again, so you should get a second offsite backup hard drive, and only have one backup hard drive in the house at a time. This road has no end, folks. I read a book by a gentleman who had seven hard drives to which he did backups, rotated into and out of his home, so he always had a backup or four offsite.

The observant among you will remember that I said I have a .Mac Mobile Me account. I also have around 20GB of pictures, and I don't know how much longer I want to pay Apple's prices for storage.

So, to recap: I have my almost-but-not-quite safe pictures on my hard drive and my Time Machine disk, and all of them up to two months ago on DVD's that are at my wife's mother's house.

And then I discovered Amazon's S3 service. (S3=Simple Storage Service) Put simply, Amazon will let you store stuff on their servers for a certain amount. Specifically, $.15/GB/month. So for my 20GB of pictures, I would pay $3 a month, or $36/year. Transfers in and out are ludicrously cheap as well, so to upload all my pictures at $.10/GB is $2.00 (Requests are $.17/GB for the first 10TB, less thereafter).  With this service, Amazon worries about having enough redundancy, getting larger hard drives as needed, etc. etc. etc. and all I worry about is sending my my $2 every month.  ( Or else they send out a creepy kid on a bike to hunt you down, man!)

So great, but I still needed a way to make sure I have my most current pictures stored at all times. Mind you, apps like Transmit (which I love) give you access to S3, but they aren't good auto-backup programs.

Enter JungleDisk. For $20 you get lifetime upgrades, and they provide a frontend that will do automatic scheduled backups to Amazon's S3, as well as allow you to mount your S3 "buckets" as a network disk. JungleDisk also encrypts all data that it stores, meaning that even if someone gets into your S3 account, if they don't use your JungleDisk username and password they can't access your files. They've created the application for all major platforms (Win/Mac/Lin), and provide a USB version that includes all three versions, so you can access your data from any computer with USB.
So, the price of peace of mind:

Second External Hard Drive:
$99 for a 500GB LaCie (or possibly $198 for two external drives)
Travel time+Gas: ~$25/year
Safe deposit box:~$50/year
Total: ~$273

Or:
 
S3
Storage: ~$36/year
Transfer:$2
JungleDisk: $20
Total: ~$58

Kinda seemed like a no-brainer.

One caveat: I have a slow (1.5Mb) DSL connection; so the initial transfer has taken (so far) 4 days, with probably one more day remaining.  Mind you, this is five days during which my wife and I have been using this computer just as we always do, web browsing/email/downloads and all. Thank goodness for a stable OS, but still, be aware.