[Leica] Storage options: Amazon Simple Storage Services

[dlridings at gmail.com (Daniel Ridings)]

It sure does feel nice to get all these welcomes back. I sincerely
appreciate it.

This is probably old hat to all now. I searched the archives, but
didn't come up with anything.

I mentioned that I bought a Mac (MacBook Pro 13" screen). I run
Lightroom on it and got myself to believe I would just use it for
quick stuff while I was out and away.

Turned out that it became more and more my standard machine and
backups started to become an issue. In my other work (the one that
pays) I need a lot of storage space. "Too much" space is not a
concept. Anyway, I ran into Amazon Simple Storage Services.

To make a long story short, if you store 1 gb (just lost this letter
because I hit the command-4 to get a $ instead of the alt-4 and had to
start over ... thinking about squirting some epoxy glue under that
right-hand command key) 1 gb will cost 15 cents a month, 10 gb (real
careful now) $ (made it) $1.50 a month.

I use it under GNU Linux at work and Mac OS X at home.

I download s3tools (a small set of Python scripts) ... there's
probably a graphical interface too, but what I like about the MacBook
is the command-line. (http://s3tools.org)

Start an account with AWS, get the access key, run the configuration
for the scrips (which involves telling it what your secret access key
is) and then:

1) cd
2) s3cmd sync ./Pictures s3://photo-archive.dlridings.se/macbook/

and go to bed. It takes a while to upload everything the first time.

Then, after I've done some more work and want to save it, I just do
the same thing:

1) cd
2) s3cmd sync ./Pictures s3://photo-archive.dlridings.se/macbook/

But the second time it just synchronizes my local files on the MacBook
with the files that are up there in the blue. If the local ones
haven't changed, it doesn't upload them again.

s3cmd ls

will list your "buckets" (my bucket above is
s3://photo-archive.dlridings.se) Everything else is an object. It kind
of looks like they are files and directories
(s3://photo-archive.dlridings.se/macbook/Pictures/Lightroom/etc) but
all of the slashes after the bucket name are just letters in the
filenames, not really directories.

It's just as easy to get things back. You can access them from
anywhere that you have an internet connection. No more USB drives
weighing you down when you're on the road.

Pretty nice stuff, and that's only the start. You can do quite a lot
using their services.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3

SMUGMUG bases their system on it. The files can be private or public,
so you can use them in web applications etc.

It _does_ cost a litte (also pennies) to transfer the files, but once
they are there, they cost max (careful now) $.15 a gigabyte a month.

You can have your buckets reside in the US or the EU. It doesn't make
any difference from a usage point of view. No matter where your
"bucket" is, you can access it over the net. You just might save some
speed across the wire.

If you have a whole turdload of files, you can send them a hard disk
and they'll off-load it directly onto their internal net.

Nice back-up solution. If anyone can think of serious down-sides, I'd
appreciate hearing about it. I'm pretty reliant on it.

Daniel

PS: I'm getting pretty tired of Google maps. Evidently CMD-4 (what I
hit instead of ALT-4) is a shortcut to Google maps.