Storing it All
By Zef Hemel
- 4 minutes read - 699 wordsAmazon S3 is Amazonās new super-scalable storage service. They say you can store as many āitemsā as you want with sizes up 5GB each. Items can be access through their SOAP or RESTful web services and I think files can also be downloaded through BitTorrent or something, but I havenāt really looked at that yet.
And what does it cost? $0.15 per GB per month. Additionally you pay $0.20 per GB traffic to and from your item store. That means I can keep my whole music collection (which is approximately 15 GB right now) on S3 for $2.25/month, not bad huh? Most of my songs are encoded on 192kbit, that means that one minute of music is about 1.425 MB big. Assuming Iād want to stream my music from S3 Iād have to stream 85.5 MB/hour, which is 1.67 ct/hour. So if I listen to, say music for 8 hours per day, 30 days per month (which is a lot), that would cost me an additional $4/month. Still, not bad huh?
Do I want this? Do I want to store my music somewhere online? Well I would feel safe if I could. I had a couple of hard drive crashes and my laptop (yes, my iBook) has broken down about 3 times in the past 5 months, which meant it was being repaired for quite an amount of that time, all this time the only way I could access my music was from my iPod, which wasnāt great. I want my music to be safe and accessible from any computer. And not only my music, but also my documents and pictures. Iāve played with different solutions for this.
One of them is MP3Tunes Locker which allows you to upload all your music for $39.95/year and stream it from the web and integrates into iTunes too (although this doesnāt work correctly on my Mac). But I donāt like it much, the web interface isnāt great and my music collection there is a mess after some failed upload attempts, plus itās not very clear how I can get all my music out of it again in a simple way. And itās only for music, you canāt store your documents there so itās only a partial solution.
Iāve also played with Appleās iDisk, which is a nice thing, but you only get 1 GB of space (for which you pay $99/year), but you can get a couple of GBs more, not the amounts I need and want though. Plus itās really not meant to store and stream your music from.
My Dreamhost account comes with 20GB of storage and 1TB of free transfer, I can also set up WebDAV access and upload files there. Iāve done this and put all my pictures and a lot of my documents there. Still itās still not it. Iām not sure how safe my files are there and how flexible it is.
S3 seems pretty nice though, but itās just a webservice API, you have to build the applications on it yourself and Iām lazy, I see a lot of cool things you could do with it (like online music storage and streaming), but donāt have the time or, how shall I call it, patience to create it.
S3 is really easy to use, I played with a Python module that allows you to easily create items and upload files and such and itās really nice and easy. Some people already started using this module to backup their Flickr photo collection to S3, and this can be done in about 25 lines of Python code.
And the nice thing is you can sign-up for free, you only get billed for what you use. I played around a bit and it seems I owe Amazon $0.01.
Being the third paragraph in a row that starting with āniceā, it would be really nice if somebody built a synchronization application for this, just to backup a directory or a couple. A web interface that allowed you to browse your ābucketsā would also be useful. I think Amazon got a very powerful product here, itās simple, which is what makes it so attractive. But we need applications that use it!