[Discuss] Tired of unreliable external drives... recommendations?

[Jay Kramer]

Dan,

This information may be dated, but, back in 2009, I was running a
linux server on Linode.  At that time, I was using Amazon’s Elastic
Cloud, EC2 and S3 to provide a really inexpensive backup to my data
files.  I used an Ubuntu instance in EC2 to provide and support a
rsync mirror to my data files.  EC2 costs $.10 per hour (back in 2009)
so I create an instance, run rsync to mirror my data files to an EC2
volume, and then terminate the instance all in the same bash script.
I can then make a snapshot of the block of data and store it in S3 for
added reliability, since Amazon provides backup storage to S3 at a
remote location.  Because there is an implementation of Linux running
on EC2, it is possible to encrypt the data prior to storing on S3.

The initial rsync is fairly costly because EC2 is expensive.  S3 data
storage is inexpensive.  Once your initial data is mirrored, it should
be relatively inexpensive to maintain the mirror.  The original
instructions that I used to make this work is located at:
http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/Backups_with_s3sync

I have not used the Amazon mirror in a while since I am no longer
using Linode.  However, I am still paying for the monthly cost of data
storage and it is only about $3 per month.

Jay