PolarLava::Blog

Revolving

Thought it was just another day
Thought you would push me away
Now I don't know what to say
See my mind it's on the floor
You got me spinning like revolving doors
In commotion, emotions are torn

I've got a lot to things to do
I'll put the aside just to talk to you —some more

I don't know what to say
Got this feeling inside my brain
I have to tell you
It drives me insane
Girl you're something
You blow me away

Maybe someday it will all be okay
Maybe someday it will all fade away
There must be some way…
A way that explains
Tell me something, do you feel the same?

What do I say about this feeling of disarray?
I'm just revolving away…

9/23/1982

"It's not going to stick because the ground is still too warm.  We nearly always see snow —at least flurries, in October."

Those would be my now immortal words to a coworker who moved to Buffalo from Florida last year.  I guess I was a little (!) wrong.  The official total was 22.6" at the airport.  At my house we were probably at about half that, but it's hard to tell because it was so wet that it packed down a lot.  And then it warmed up and started melting rapidly.  But in any case this was basically a "once a century storm" sort of thing.  There were predictions that we could see a few inches of snow with the "chance" of conditions producing "the perfect storm".  Which is exactly what happened.

I spent two long chilly days at home with the family, but had plenty of work to do around the house.  I don't have many trees in my yard, but my neighbor behind my house has two huge maples at the back of his lot.  These two trees dropped a good deal of limbs and debris in his yard, two other neighbor's yards as well as mine and  on my garage.  Thus there was plenty of cleaning up to be done.  Next up was hauling in wood and getting the fireplace going as it became clear that we might be without power for days.  Fortunately for us, it was "only" two days.  Others have not been so fortunate as they are still without power and in some cases, will be for the next week.  Compounding that was the rapidly melting snow and many have also been flooded.  Again, not me as we sit on ground that is always high and dry.  You can see the effects on my neighborhood from the pictures.  Fortunately the only tree casualty in my yard was my Japanese Maple that had a large branch fall on it and snap one of it's branches.  The other problem was my phone line's anchor pulled out of the house so the line fell in the street.  The wires remained connected so once the power came back on I still had phone and DSL internet access.

And that coworker?  Well, she unfortunately lives in Amherst, one of the hardest hit areas.  They got closer to 3 feet of snow and will be without power for quite some time yet.

So last Friday I decided that Amazon's S3 was the way to go so I opened up an account and started playing with a few s3 tools.  I've started collecting the useful things I've found on my s3 del.icio.us tag for those who might be interested in following suit.  Not something I'm looking for, but if you are simply looking to backup a Windows workstation, Jungle Disk looks like a good choice.

One thing I hadn't considered before was storing my mp3's ripped from my music collection.  That's a quick 7-8GB (and growing) I hadn't considered.  But to store that is still only $1.20/mo and $1.60 to upload it.  I'd say that's pretty reasonable and it seems safe and secure in the long run.  Thus the big upload push has begun…  Next up will be figuring out how to backup/rsync my website on a regular basis.

So for some time now I've contemplated the prospect of online backup/storage.  I don't have a lot of confidence in my home PC, nor do I have the time or mental fortitude to build and maintain a backup server.  I simply have other things I'd rather do with my time these days.  Thus I always thought that having secure remote storage would be ideal.  But when I first thought about it it wasn't a viable option because of the cost and the bandwidth to shuffle things back and forth.
——

This past week I read with interest Jeremy Zawodny's blog entries Replacing my home backup server with Amazon's S3 and A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools.  Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) seems just like the sort of thing I'm looking for although I haven't had time to really look into some of the tools available.  One thing that I wish it did have was SFTP or SCP access.

Among the comments some suggest using DreamHost to do something similar, but at a lower cost.  I'm all for that and for file storage I this would probably be workable even though I'd never consider using them for web hosting…I've read too many bad things even with all the talk I hear about how wonderful they are.  Thanks but no thanks.  Besides, this is outside the scope of what this entry is about.  It would also be nice primarily because it would be readily available via SFTP and SCP.  But the real downside is that it violates their Terms of Service which states "The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Webhosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website…" so at any time they could shut your file storage down.  Plus their infrastructure surely isn't as fault tolerant or distributed as Amazon's.

So at this point I'm looking at it a bit, but without any clear decisions.  I know I need to do something as most of my data at home is not reliably backed up and my photo collection just keeps growing.  At this point I know I would need 3-4GB right out of the gate to store all of it.  I'm sort of waiting to see what else Jeremy has to say on the matter, as well as his commenter's.  But if you're reading this, have some experience with online storage and have some ideas, please point me at anything you think might be useful.