adam @ 404

My ipod pooped out on me a couple months back. I’ve been worried about losing my mp3 collection if I ever had a hard drive failure on my mac. Scary stuff. I need to figure out a backup solution. I’m thinking about trying out one user’s solution that utilizes one of Amazon’s web services, Simple Storage Service or S3. Let me get on that one.

Addendum: It took me minutes to setup my Amazon web services account for S3 (it’s quick if you already have an Amazon account), downloaded JungleDisk, put in my S3 info and away I went copying my mp3s into the jungledisk directory. The easiest way to get the files backed up is to run a periodic backup (like once a day). If you notice the backups are causing your network speeds to lag, there’s an option to throttle the backup speeds down so they don’t consume all your throughput. (I’m getting 80Kb/sec upload speeds on a line that is rated at 96Kb/sec, which is pretty damn good considering some of that is taken up by network overhead.) Doing periodic backups is nice since you don’t have to run JungleDisk as a foreground application. A++ I lied about it running in the background. You still have to run JungleDisk to get the automatic backup to start. Kinda lame.

One thing to note is that if you reorganize files around by changing file info, or moving files within the directory, it will delete anything changed and re-backup the files which incurs transfer costs (.20$/Gbyte/month). Luckily, iTunes does a good job of organizing files the first time if you’re downloading from iTunes or importing from CD. With about 16Gb (168 hours of music) of storage and traffic in the first month, I’m looking to spend $5.60 and somewhere around $2.60 every month thereafter if I keep my library relatively static. It’d be nicer if it was half that price, but it’s good enough for peace of mind.

If anyone wants help setting this up, let me know.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Music, Tech and Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.