Andy

Tilana Reserve…
- protects files securely, off-site
- syncs file between your computers
- includes Web access
- keeps versions when you save
- archives deleted files
- makes it easy to retrieve files
- works in the background

You can use Tilana Reserve on as many computers as you want. The software doesn’t cost anything – just download it for free from the website.

Whenever you create a file, or save changes, Tilana Reserve updates the files to your personal space at the Tilana Reserve off-site data center.

You don’t have to swap out tapes, manage backup disks, or even remember to press a button, like some external backup drives.

When you protect files in Tilana Reserve, you can also sync them between any of your computers on the same account. Every time you save a file, the new version gets protected in the data center, and your other computers automatically get it from there, so they’re always current.

Check it out at http://www.tilana.com

you cannot beat the price of amazon’s s3 (jungle drive is free to use). in fact, my bill for last month was as follows: i transferred .267 gb worth of data, which cost $0.06 and my total storage was 5.095 gb, which cost $0.77 to host for a grand total of $0.83 for the month. impossible to beat that price.

For my My Business folder I use Mozy. It’s free, and every day when I come back to the computer there’s that reassuring “Your files have been backed up” dialog box. It really makes me feel great :) Because it’s the My Business folder (mostly Word docs), I haven;’t run into the free size limitation yet.

You get 200 GB of storage space, increasing by 1GB/week, along with the usual array of web services all for $8/month. You also get 2TB (that’s right–terabytes) of transfer (increasing by 16 GB/month). There’s nothing new to learn either–the web administrative interface is ultra easy, and they support FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV. Heck, they’ll even register a domain name for you for free.

Just so you know, I have no financial connection to Dreamhost–they’d give me a referral bonus if you actually sign up under my reference, but I’m not putting that link here just to prove it. They’re just that good.

What’s pretty interesting about the Electric Cloud stuff is that you can either create server images (and store them on S3) OR you can select from a variety of pre-configured server images – and then you can instance those servers via an API call (and shut them down either via standard shutdown commands, or via another API call). This gives rise to the possibility of server farms that are created on the fly via programming as they are needed (i.e. automatic reactions to be Slashdotted, GigaOmed, techcrunched etc).

It also points, I think, to the likely future of server hosting and servers in general – rather than spending a lot of time and money buying depreciating assets, you should be able to buy the use of servers on demand which are precisely configured for your application’s requirements – and then instead of leaving them live as targets for hackers, you simplely have them automatically turned off when they are no longer needed – paying only for the computation that is used and a very nominal charge for the storage.

One concern, like many others, around using S3 for off-site backups is the bandwidth issue – not on Amazon’s side but on my local network. I would have about 70gbs which I would need to backup (at least once) and then about 500-1gb PER DAY that changes on my local system (possibly much more – if my email were backed up as a new copy of the .pst file each night, that alone would be over 2gbs to back up each night).

Another concern, as Doug Kaye points out in a blog post (linked to in the comments to Jeremy’s post), is whether the backups via S3 will be versioned or will they be more like mirroring drives (and encrypting them probably) offsite?

(which raises another issue/thought – I can’t wait until Leopard from Apple, their new automated backup stuff seems really, really good – especially if it could work both with a local backup HD as well as an offsite tool such as S3 – versioned backups with easy restores – but hopefully handling backups over the wire/network smoothly…. may be enough to get me to switch from XP to the Mac)

Shannon

any suggestions on how someone like me could use this to back up my data and how does it compare with say dot.mac. i would love to get some help on that, and use it as a guest post. anyone interested?