“… now wiggle with it.”

I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve recently been hit with a fear of loss of data. This should have hit me earlier as I’ve lost three hard drives in the past two or so years. And I know it’ll happen again. Mostly it was because I was a college student and anything but ‘free’ was too expensive.

And it’ll, more likely than not, happen to you to. Of course, hard drives have gotten better through the years, but the failure might not be hardware related. Other things could happen: fire, theft, dog ate my hard drive, leprechauns, etc.

So because of my fear of leprechauns stealing my hard drive, I decided to look into the alternatives (read: read a lot of blogs) and found Amazon S3. It’s not free, but now that I’m making money, I figure it’s ok to spend a couple bucks to save my important data (pictures!). It’s basically Amazon offering their own storage space to us common folk. I looked at a few other options, such as Mozy, that looked very similar to Amazon’s service. Ultimately, I figured that Amazon has created and maintained many, many Data centers throughout the years, so your data is probably safe with them.

The service itself doesn’t provide an easy way to drag and drop your data, but there’s a piece of software called JungleDisk that makes your Amazon storage space look like another drive so that you can drag and drop! It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Now how much does it cost? No, it’s not free, but it’s pretty affordable. Most of the charges come from how much data is sitting on their servers, as well as how much traffic goes to and from their servers (uploading/downloading). Here’s a breakdown of my costs so far:

• Initial Cost: Amazon: $0, JungleDisk: $20
• Initial Upload: Amazon: $12
• Storage Cost: Amazon: $6 (40gb of photos)

So far, it’s cost me $38. So not “cheap” per se. But that’s only the initial startup cost. It now costs me around ~$6 a month to maintain what I have now, and I imagine it’ll only go up by a couple of bucks every half year or so.

I won’t go into the details, but eventually it’ll be cheaper to have an extra external hard drive (and even a RAID system, you still won’t have the reliability and replication that you’ll have with Amazon. And those leprechauns, don’t forget the leprechauns.