Backups

A friend of mine at school wrote a plaintive note to the school list asking for photos of her time at school, as her computer disk had crashed and she lost all her photos. When we were in New Orleans, we talked with Matt, the homeowner whose house we helped repair, and he noted one of his most painful losses was all his photes, which he had backed up to CD, but not stored offsite. I worry about my photos. And then I worry more about all the documents I create in ministry: sermons, articles, lesson plans, notes and other stuff I want to hang on to.

I'm beginning to make my acquaintance with Jungledisk, a front-end program for backing up to Amazon S3. S3, or Simple Storage Service, is a web-based data storage service, redundant, secure, industrial strength, but not designed for the ordinary user. Jungledisk acts like a disk drive that pushes your data to S3. You can copy things to and from this disk drive. You can also set it to back up your data periodically; I have it back up every four hours, and keep old copies up to 60 days. The service is relatively cheap: roughly $0.15 per gigabyte stored plus $0.10 per gigabyte transferred in; my backups for my home and work machines are costing me about $2 per month. Jungledisk is a $20 shareware app that you can try for free.

I'm not sure this is the ultimate solution. Jungledisk is a little crufty on the user interface. But I do know I am more comfortable knowing my stuff is 'out there', backed up remotely as well as locally.