Stuff to do with Amazon's S3 Storage

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When Amazon launched their S3 storage service, I was kind of taken aback. I thought it was neat, but wasn't exactly sure what to do with it myself. But it's been in the back of my mind since. Slowly, I've started thinking about things that I could store in a big, safe, cheap, always-available repository... Then Matt posted this morning a Python Script to back up all his Flickr Photos to S3, and I thought, *that's cool.*

Now I'm starting to wonder what sort of stuff would be good to back up from my personal life as well. I had only been thinking of commercial ideas before, but it'd be very useful as a general "geek's storage," no? For example, I really like having my own personal web server at a co-lo, and I use it regularly to store stuff that I'll need to have access to later... but because it's so public, it really is a target. It already got hacked into last year via that Awstats exploit, and I'm sure it'll happen again in the future as well. Since then I've tried not to store a lot of important stuff on there and back it my dbs regularly, but still... it's never as good as it could be. So another place I could put stuff I need programatic access to that isn't on my web server would be great. And a process I could set off where my server is just essentially "rsynched" to S3, would be great too (anyone written that yet? :-) ). Same thing for my home computer. Storing personal data OUT THERE is always risky, but it's better than losing all my data forever if there's an earthquake or fire or something (always a possibility in California...).

Of course there's also other storage services like Box.net, XDrive, etc. But I'm a techie, and the point is that it'll be cheap and easy to store gigs and gigs of random data on S3 easily via APIs - that's a bit outside the norm for the consumer-facing storage services. Besides, just the fact that S3 is out there is just tweaking me... I've got to figure out something to use it for.

:-)

-Russ

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