Amazon S3: October 2009 Archives

I've enjoyed Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog on ZDNet for a while now, but his most recent entry really hits you where you live — if you have a lot of stuff on a computer hard drive that you'd really not like to lose in an instant.

Zack accidentally kicked out the power plug on his computer, scrambled his hard drive ... and faces a huge, huge bill if he wants to recover years' worth of data:

Through no will of trying, I have now come to a sound, unfortunate conclusion, that my hard drive is well and truly screwed. My data is fully intact but I have absolutely no way of accessing it. And did I back up my machine? Of course I did – but on a separate partition, and on that hard drive.

A backup on the same drive? Bad idea.

That's why we all should ignore the garment-rending in the geek arena over the privacy implications of storing data in the cloud with a service such as Amazon S3 (via something like JungleDisk) or with DropBox, Mozy or any number of competing services.

Yes, there are problems in the cloud and with off-site, networked backups. But the benefits far, far outweigh the risks of not doing multiple backups in multiple ways and at multiple locations.

By all means, follow Zach's advice and back up to a detachable, external hard drive (preferably more than one). But don't think that's enough.

You don't just need a backup. You need a backup plan — one with the kind of redundancy that a cloud backup can add to one that also includes multiple hard drives stored in different places.

I'm getting increasingly comfortable keeping and viewing all of my photos online. Printing them? Yeah, every once in a while, but not every one, multiple times, like we used to.

I've got thousands of e-mails, most of which I probably could lose without tears but which serve as a huge database of information that I'd rather preserve than do without.

I probably should be making printouts of my "important" writing, should I do anything like that at some point in the future. Yep, paper — though bulky — can be the ultimate backup. Clay tablets are good, too.

But the reality is that my aversion to clutter (yes, despite my immersion in it) means keeping more and more things on bigger and bigger hard drives (I just saw a 2TB model from Seagate ... 1.5 TB is old hat, I guess) and making sure, through multiple backups (and backups in the cloud that are worth paying for), that I don't lose all of this data due to my own propensity for kicking out power plugs, or any number of natural and man-made disasters.