Lots of photos? backups...

I had somewhat of a rude awakening yesterday when I found that one of the external drives that I use to backup my precious computer files was misbehaving. I/O errors, ouch!

I’ve wanted a copy of my files offsite (as in not at home) for a while. I’ve been using 2 external drives, keeping one at home, with the intent on keeping the second drive at my office. Sometimes that happens, but more often it doesn’t. So I've had two backup disks, but both have been in the same physical location. That's not really too smart, is it?

I recently became aware of Amazon S3 (also known as Simple Storage Service). Files stored on S3 are kept in multiple physical locations. And it's an offsite (away from home!) storage location, with no need for me to carry disks anywhere. I'm sold, now all I need to do is get my files copied.

File copies are in progress, and I'm relieved!

If you're interested, here's a link to Amazon S3.

In addition to S3, you will need a product to drive the backup process. I'm currently using a tool called Jungle Disk. There are others available as well.