I caught this linked off of Scripting News:
Bye Tin Machine. Bye dPod. Bye Sprocket. I’m going to miss you guys. And I’m especially going to miss all my year’s of data; pix of Aimee and good friends and my first Burning Man. Videos of artformula hooping in the barn with such grace. My various outlines, containing my thoughts, dreams, ideas. My old emails, that I was saving forever, in order to remember the love I felt at one time for another human, and the ensuing email exchanges that lifted my heart. Goodbye to all the calendar entries that I dutifully entered into DayLite, content in knowing that I could look back at my past using this filter to see how far I’d come. Goodbye to my lovely red backpack which always seemed to fit just the right amount of stuff and hang so well on my back. Some of this was backed up, most not. You know how it goes. Well, hopefully not.
These kinds of stories always scare me. I’ve considered building an online service using technology like that from Coraid to establish a storage farm, but I think Amazon already did.
Which leaves me with some simple questions for Amazon’s S3 team:
If I encourage my parents to back up all of their pictures to your service, how long will you be around? How robust is S3 as a backup? Is it truly geographically redundant storage? Can I *trust* it?
It seems like the best option available to me to date. Other than that, I need to purchase a quality tape drive and become a backup-admin for myself and my parents.