Amazon S3 Price Change

I loved reading Shawn Blanc’s post about online backup. He did a great job reviewing the pros and cons of the best options. I’ve avoided most of these services because I have never personally met someone that has restored from an online backup. I have used Amazon’s S3 service for storing and sharing files, but never considered it for a backup option due to the steep price for large amounts of data. For example, when I was looking at S3, this is how the pricing would break down for my 1TB iTunes library.

Upload

$0.10/GB x 1TB = $100

Restore

$0.14/GB x 1TB = $140

Monthly Updates

$0.10/GB x 10GB = $1.00

So, the monthly update charges would be minimal, but the initial upload is quite expensive. Of course the download is also expensive, but if you lost your entire iTunes library, $140 seems like a small price to pay to get it back.

Of course, I have no idea if my Verizon FiOS service would also hit me with a big overage charge. I don’t think my initial contract included a data cap but my renewal may have.

A Price Change

Amazon just announced a new pricing model (thanks to Shawn again for the heads up) that makes their product much more enticing. They now offer FREE uploads and reduced the download cost by a small amount. I’m hopefully that other providers like RackSpace will try to compete on price so customers benefit from a competitive pricing all around.

I’ve decided to take a leap and purchase Arq for S3 backups and actually exercise my S3 account.