Amazon AWS S3 for backups, content delivery etc

Posted November 9th, 2010 in Offsite Articles

I was looking into setting up an Amazon AWS S3 account to backup my 35GB archive of photos and videos (previously backed up via rsync to my now retired dedicated server) and wondering the best way to go about it when along came an article at Nettuts to cover just what I needed.

Using AWS S3 to Power Your Digital World

The article was written by Jarel Remick and firstly introduces what AWS S3 is all about and then how to go about using it. Sections covered are:

• S3 + Jungle Disk to give you cross platform drag and drop access to your S3 buckets
• S3 as a “CDN” or Public File Access to use Amazon as a content delivery network, including information about how to manage it with plugins for Firefox and WordPress
• S3 + CloudFront to turn it into a true content delivery network with multiple global locations
• S3 + S3Sync to create an automated offsite server backup system

As usual with these sorts of posts it's a good idea to have a read through the comments as they provide other useful insights.

In particular someone points out that on the Mac (and probably on Windows) there are a number of FTP clients that also allow login access to S3 buckets. These include s3hub and CyberDuck.

Another interesting comment is that "S3 currently has no bill cap controls, meaning that if you put a public Amazon S3 URL out there, somebody could launch a DoS on it and bankrupt you. One way around this is to use temp URLs, check the S3 forum."

Read the article at Nettuts: Using AWS S3 to Power Your Digital World