I think Amazon S3 is awesome. I was looking into building a RAID NAS (Network-Attached Storage) for backing up all my important data and I nearly bought a setup that would run into the hundreds of dollars - but then I did a little fancy multiplication and addition and realized S3 would cost me less than one one-hundredth what the NAT would have cost.
In case you’re as in the dark about S3 as I recently was, here’s a little rundown: it’s a very simple, super fast, extremely large backup system that Amazon uses for all of it’s own storage needs. It’s opened the service up to the public on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Costs:
- $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
- $0.20 per GB of data transferred
In other words, it’s damn cheap. Say you want to upload 500 MS Word documents that are around 45KB each? How much would it cost to store those on some easy-to-access, highly secure, permanent backup place? Less than one cent per month. Eight years later you’d only be out a half-dollar ($0.32 to be precise).
So S3 is my new storage/backup location of choice. The one difficulty of using it is that I need to figure out some way of automating the backups so that the backups are actually useful and can easily be recovered if necessary. In particular, I need some way to automatically backup the website data that is so crucial to me.
So I made a plugin.
The S3 plugin will allow you to backup your crucial website data to S3 via a handy Rake task (written by the talented Adam Greene).
Amazon has been an excellent supporter of Ruby/Rails lately (they fund 43things.com among other things) and they’ve made sure to release a ruby library for S3. I’ve combined that with Adam’s S3 rake task into a handy S3 backup plugin.
You can install it via the following two commands:
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ruby script/plugin source http://svn.6brand.com/projects/plugins ruby script/plugin install -x s3 |
Then backing up is easy as:
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rake s3:backup:db rake s3:backup:code rake s3:backup:scm |
or, to get them all together:
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rake s3:backup |