Use Amazon S3 to automatically back up your Mac

Feb 11, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Amazon's S3 is an online storage solution; you pay for only what you use ($0.15/GB/month, plus some transfer costs). I wrote a simple step-by-step guide to setting you a Mac to sync with Amazon S3; here's the executive summary version:

  1. You need an Amazon Web Services account. Once signed up, you'll need your Amazon access key and your secret key. These are what s3sync will use to authenticate you to Amazon.
  2. You'll need this zip file (1.2MB), which contains all the files you are going to need.
  3. You need to create a "bucket" at Amazon to store your files. To create the bucket, you need of the S3 GUI applications that exist. I have included in the zip file the one I have used called S3 Browser (latest version). When creating your bucket, remember that the name has to be globally unique.
  4. In the s3backup folder created from the zip file downloaded above, you need to edit backup.sh. Replace the placeholder access key, secret key, and bucket name with the ones you obtained in the previous steps.
  5. The application will run as root at the system level in order to prevent file access issues, therefore I recommend storing the entire s3backup folder in your /Library folder. If you store it elsewhere, some paths in the backup.sh file will need to be updated.
  6. Set up your Mac to automatically run the backup shell script at regular intervals via cron or launchd.
[robg adds: The above is a very short summary of the much-more-detailed guide linked in the first sentence; make sure you read the full version for more help with this hint. Note too that S3 charges both for storage as well as for transfer in and out. You can use Amazon's Simple Monthly Calculator to get a feel for how much you would spend, based on your estimates of storage and transfer. I haven't tested this hint.]

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