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.
Gabe, I use Arq to backup my over 40 gigs of photos. It works in the background and I haven’t spent more than $5 a month. I haven’t had to restore anything yet, but having an offsite copy of all my photos is worth the price.
I don’t see anything about changing the storage cost. Their S3 pricing page at http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ says it will cost you 14 cents per gigabyte per month to store your data. Your 1TB iTunes library will cost $140 per month to store. That still seems like a lot of money.
Or am I missing something, and the storage won’t cost as much as I think it will?
Following the link at the end of the post. It takes you to the new pricing. That said, you are absolutely correct about the storage price. To be honest, their storage pricing page focuses on transfer rates and not monthly storage. You are correct. Monthly storage is still a deal breaker for my iTunes library.
Thanks for clearing that up — for a short time I was really excited that I can let upload my 1 TB iTunes Library for free and in addition keep the monthly storage cost close to a zero. But that already felt so unreal and I’m glad you’ve mentioned it here before I dove right into the gathering information/uploading stuff mode.