[SATLUG] Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3)...

[John Pappas]

Hey All,

I have been playing with AWS S3 lately.  Has anyone else?  What other
online storage services are you all using, if any? 

For those of you who may not know of this service, it is a pay to use
online storage service.  Current rates are $0.17/GB/Month and $0.20/GB
transferred.

I love it.

Long story follows.

Unfortunately, as this is only a web service, one must acquire an
application to access this web service.  There are several, I am using
JungleDisk.  The problem with jungledisk is that you can only access via
Localhost WebDAV (Konquerer).  I did some looking around, and installed
FUSE (Userspace FileSystem Framework) and Fuse_KIO (KDE Plugin based on
fuse that maps any KIO_Slave Process (FISH, WebDav, etc) as a mount
point.

So I now regularly use 2 FUSE mounts, a FISH (FS via SSH) and S3 via
JungleDisk WebDAV via FUSE_KIO.  I admit, this is a bit kludgey, but I
did not want to develop an app by hand (or have my wife do it ;)

I did some speed testing, and I get 100% bandwidth utilization on both
ups and downs (Work=T1 (1.5Mb) & Home=TWC Cable (1Mb/8Mb))

Point in this exercise?  Cheap online backup/storage.  All told,
Assuming that you upload a GB and download it twice in a month, total
cost is $0.77/GB/Month.  In my case, I intend to upload once and
(ideally) never download it (a backup method only), I will spend about
$0.37/GB/Month.  I could not find an UNLIMITED use, fast, online storage
service for any less than $1/GB/Month.  If anybody is using one, please
let me know.

Thanks for listening!
John