Smart Server backups with Amazon S3

Server backups are Important and with cloud computing and cloud storage, now more then ever we're spoilt for choice. I came across a great article about how to bulletproof sever backups with Amazon S3 that I just had to share.

Problem 1: One of the annoying things about server backups is the fact that they take up space. While hard drive space gets cheaper and cheaper it may be the case that the hard drive space on your server might be more costly then storage you could obtain elsewhere.

Problem 2: The other important aspect of backups relates to being able to actually using them when you need to. Backing up to the same server isn't always the best solution because if you're server is unavailable so are your backups.

The Solution: So can you really find cheap storage space, that's offsite and redundant? We'll that's the whole point of Amazon S3! The problem?...You still need to figure your backup process to work with S3, so lets take a look at how.

The Howto: To start with you'll need your Amazon S3 information (Access Key ID, Secret Key). If you don't have an account it's easy to setup an Amazon S3 account and you only pay for what you use. If you only ever setup and create a few test scripts you'll probably only end up paying a couple of dollars. Create a bucket in Amazon S3 to store your server backups, you can think of this bucket as a top-level directory.

There are many different tools and approaches to online storage, but making sure you have automated backups, offsite is one of the best things you can do (you'll thank yourself when your server is down and you need your data).