Yes, I’ve heard similar stories about Dreamhost too.
It would be great if Amazon were to offer Subversion access, but till then, perhaps this is a viable option for you: SvnToS3.

I’ve started using Amazon S3 now for my backups and I feel like it’s a good choice. I think that their price point is reasonable. Expensive enough to make me feel like I’m getting what I paid for and not so expensive I feel like I’m getting ripped off.

I just wish there were an alternative to Jungle Disk to be able to use a Subversion repository with S3. I am still on the hunt for that.

Interesting, I didn’t know that about DreamHost. Another thing to consider is that Google is most likely to launch a service to offer online backup, so it will be interesting to see what their services are like and what pricing model they will use.

I think the latest thing was that if the majority of your files weren’t accessible from the web, they could possibly kill your account. It’s one of those things where they won’t do anything unless it is “abused” but the definition of that is open to interpretation! Personally, I’d feel much more comfortable with something like S3 for backup.

One more expensive alternative that I’ve heard good things about is rsync.net. It’s $1.60 per gig, but it supports subversion directly and SSH and FTP as well as webdav. I think a neat possibility could be S3 for big stuff like images and video and rsync for documents/programming (if you use subversion for that to track changes).

Those are, of course, good options. If you want to display the files to friends and family as well, that seems like the best way to go. For me, when it comes to pictures, I share them with Flickr, which hasn’t got any limit either, for $24.95 a year.

Unlimited storage all your photos and videos. Supports up to 20mb per photo and 2GB/10min per video. That’s awesome.

Also, they have redundant backups to Amazon S3 of all places.

Cost: $55/year or $299/lifetime

And on top of all these features, you can actually SEE your photos and videos, share them with family, etc. You can’t do that with Mozy or Amazon S3. To me it’s pointless to backup photos and videos to an online service if I can’t see them or share them.

I currently use Mozy for other data like music, documents, Aperture metadata, etc.

I used to be perfectly satisfied hosting my photos on Flickr, but now that I have all sorts of data eg RAW files from my digital SLR, documents, videos etc - I have to seriously look into what Amazon has to offer with their S3 service.

Thanks again!

Oh, I can definitely relate to the fear of losing pictures of your children. Good luck with your external hard drive!

I forgot all about hard drives! Doh! I have 3 in my computer, but even that’s not enough.

Robert, thanks for the post, great reading, I’ve been thinking about backing up my stuff better since I went digital. I sure would be sad to lose all our baby pictures But I still think a third party is kinda creepy, so I’ll be getting a removable drive. Let’s hope that keeps me going for a while

Sounds like an interesting option, if it were to happen.

I’m sure the upstream would be fairly small for day-to-day use: keeping costs down, and it would certainly save having to constantly connect up my MBP to an external drive.

Wait and see I guess…

Thanks for that.

I saw Jeff from Amazon at d.Construct last year talking about S3 just after it had been launched. He was talking about the way they’d put it together, the most important aspect of which seemed to be that they had assumed from the outset that things would go wrong. The whole system is built on the assumption that things fail.

And the biggest advantage to this kind of system is that it’s automated and real-time (if you use something like CrashPlan). No messing around with uploads, having to remember to back up or anything else - just programs running in the background.

Ah, $5 a month is way too pricy for me; at least, at this moment.

Pat,

I can’t directly quote what they offer, but in my mind, Amazon should have a better coverage for fires, robberies etc than what I have as a private person.

But yes, we’re all rats.

If you burn something on a DVD, you don’t know how long it will last before there’s any data loss. Also, any kind of damage (dropping, breaking, burglars, house fire) could occur and then the data’s lost forever.

Using an Internet-based storage service means that it is always available, from wherever you are, where they make backups of your data and basically has all the worries of making sure the data isn’t lost.

What means of insurance do they offer? They can’t be immune from what you just mentioned, fires, robberies, mother nature, etc… I still think it’s better/faster to burn your data on disk, and invest in a good fire retardant safe, and be diligent with making sure your back-ups are still working and scratch free. When it comes to guarantees both by a third party or yourself.. well.. there just aren’t any, and that’s the ugly truth. The only benefit I assume with using a third party is having access to your files from anywhere.. if you travel a lot, then it might be worth it. We’re all becoming weird little cyber pack rats, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day it all blew up in our faces

Personal (Mac and PC)
http://mozy.com/

and Pro/Enterprise version (PC only I think)
http://www.mozypro.com/