Anyone using S3 to backup their NAS?

marshac

American Hero
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Mar 25, 2003
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If so, what NAS are you using, how much data do you store, and what's your monthly S3 bill?
 
That sounds like a horrible idea due to cost, but there are alternatives that focus more on storage... None are really as reliable though (backblaze, carbonite, crashplan, etc). Azure blob storage is almost the same price as s3 as an alternative from a large cloud provider.

It's kind of like cars, you can have fast, cheap, reliable, but you can only choose two.
 
S3 is just too expensive for simple backup esspecially for home use in my opinion.
This. That calculator told me it'd be almost $1,000/month to back up a mere 4TB with the same usage patterns as I have right now. For a grand a month, I could offsite-colocate and own the hardware. Hell, it's less than $100/month for 2U of rack space with a 100Mbps unmetered connection.
 
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This. That calculator told me it'd be almost $1,000/month to back up a mere 4TB with the same usage patterns as I have right now. For a grand a month, I could offsite-colocate and own the hardware. Hell, it's less than $100/month for 2U of rack space with a 100Mbps unmetered connection.

It depends on the particular need. For wholesale "backup everything I have" I agree that it's not very cost effective.

I use S3 as a backup for the "irreplacable" files that I have - documents, photos, things like that. No need to use it as a backup for recorded TV/ripped movies (I currently use external hard drives as the backup for that), so I'm only looking at around $7-$10/month.
 
My main use (aside from My Pictures and My Music on my win7 workstation) is to save periodic tarballs of the mail directories on my server...
 
This. That calculator told me it'd be almost $1,000/month to back up a mere 4TB with the same usage patterns as I have right now. For a grand a month, I could offsite-colocate and own the hardware. Hell, it's less than $100/month for 2U of rack space with a 100Mbps unmetered connection.

S3 isn't meant as a cheap bulk-backup location. It is a buy-the-compute-power-you-need-and-we-happen-to-offer-storage-but-charge-through-the-nose-for-a-lot-of-it service. If you want really cheap and very reliable, use backblaze.
 
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