Everbody’s thinking about S3 for backup

I can see today that I’m hardly the only one messing around with Amazon’s super-cheap S3 online storage system as a possible off-site backup strategy. Jeremy Zawodny, whose has been wanting/predicting solid online backup for a while, says he’s experimenting with S3, but doesn’t give all the details yet (like what software is he using, for example). Almost as interesting as Zawodny’s post are the comments on his post where a host of informed folk raise important questions and offer alternatives like $5/month Carbonite (which unfortunately works only on Windows XP so far).

The greatest challenge I have faced using S3 so far is the glacial pace at which Comcast and Verizon let me upload. In an earlier posting, Zawodny compared the first online backup to filling his parents’ pool with a garden hose when he was growing up:

“It took many hours to fill a swimming pool with the garden hose doing the work, but we really didn’t worry about it that much. Sure, the water pressure in the rest of the house was a bit lower during that time. It will still livable. Eventually, the pool was filled and everyone was happy. I think the same technique works for on-line backups of one’s hard disk. Using Quality of Service (QoS) controls at the network level and some intelligent scheduling on the client side, a service could offer the peace of mind that comes from automated and professionally managed backups that don’t bog down the computer or the network.”

That is probably true but it seems like it’s taking forever to upload just my 20 GB of music and video files using Jungle Disk on my Mac (an upload of a few hundred key text files took minutes, of course). I also tried Jungle Disk for Windows on my new bargain basement W2K system. While the program was a lot more responsive in terms of listing directory contents, upload speeds were the same as on my Mac. Doh.

Others are also thinking about the same issues. Thomas Claburn at Informationweek argues that the broadband providers decision to cripple upload speeds is the Achilles heel of online backup services. He started a 67 GB backup to S3 using Jungle Disk but gave up because it was slow and slowed his computer to a crawl while it was working in the background. At least I don’t have that problem.