My hard drive, which was throwing a huge fit this last weekend and caused me to lose 3 days of productivity to work on one of my 6 side-projects, looks to have finally died sometime late last night. The failure of this drive as well as the drives on my last two iPods has made me start to hate hard drives and their fragility. Sure you can have 100, 200, 300 gigabytes of storage on your computer, but what are you going to do when those crash? What are going to do when you need to back up all that data? Buy yet another hard drive? Then what about backing up that drive?
One solution is on-line storage and for me, that’s the direction I have chosen to take. Using Amazon’s S3 (simple storage service) I backed up most of the data from my notebook computer before the drive failed(I think I am going to lose the last 4 days of emails and a few Photoshop comps) to the S3 servers where it sits, encrypted.
S3 is a web service currently geared towards application and web developers who need a lot of storage for their projects but don’t want to, or simply can’t pay for space they may not need or use. S3 provides unlimited storage at a low price, $0.15 a gigabyte a month stored. Good enough for me, but since I didn’t have the time to code something to use this service, I looked for existing tools.
Enter JungleDisk, a software application that will upload and encrypt your data to the S3 servers which you can then access from any computer with JungleDisk installed. What you need is simply sign up for access to Amazon’s Web Services, and you can use JungleDisk. JungleDisk is a small app the creates a network connection to S3 and maps that connection as a folder. All you need to do is just drag and drop your files to that folder and they are moved on over.
But JungleDisk isn’t the only player to utilize Amazon’s S3, there are other applications that do the same, and more are presumably coming. A few of them, as listed on TechCrunch, are Altexa, ElephantDrive, and MediaSilo. None of which I have tried as of yet, but may in the near future.
This current solution won’t be for everyone. I’m not using S3 as a network drive (I need a lower price to access the data more frequently), it is just my backup drive, where I will place files I will access, probably rarely, at a later date and time, but still need to keep a hold of. Having said that, I will still look for some sort of on-line storage for use of a network drive, you know, because I hate the hard drives now.
July 28th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Doesn’t Hitachi make the drives in iPods?
July 28th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
yes, that is correct
July 28th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
What is this Hitachi you speak of?
July 30th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Keep in mind that the online storage companies you use probally use HardDrives too.
Flash can’t hold as much data, and my cousin (who works on flash memory as an engineer) says the data can easily be lost from Flash.
Hardrives however have a big flaw as they have moving parts.
Have you been keeping an eye on ‘holographic’ storage?
July 30th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Yes, they do, but Amazon are the ones that need to worry about the drives, not me.
sort of like web hosting, the web host company deals with all the hardware, security, bandwidth issues, not me.
August 1st, 2006 at 10:05 pm
Mine crashed the day before yours did I think. I’ve had to temporarily resurrect my old super-clunker with its pentium II processor.
Par for the course this summer. hfg
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:25 am
hmm… must be some sort of conspiracies
September 8th, 2006 at 12:33 am
[...] Look into using FreeNAS as a local backup solution and maybe tie in with Amazon’s S3 [...]
February 17th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Hey! I prefer to store important information on Online Web Space ao long it keeps me safe, so that I can open/download everywhere.
August 20th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Yes! I can understand how you go mad when your HDD crashed especially if its stored with loads of important files and I have they just hate the hard drive .As per my thinking ” EVERY PROBLEM HAS ITS OWN SOLUTION” so guys don’t be panic and go to some good data recovery centre and I suggest HDRC the best. I’m their regular client and I have seen their products a excellent one. u can visit their sites http://www.hdrconline.com
Cheers!
CORIN
Note: sorry for my bad English. Hopefully not so bad hehe