07
Oct
A commercially viable automated backup solution for web design agencies using Amazon S3. Sweet!
For any small business there are a multitude of ways to backup data as part of a disaster recovery plan.
Unfortunately, each tends to have several drawbacks and quite often cost is a biggy. Server infrastructure, administrator skill, specialist hardware, co-location - all carry with them a big cost burden.
There are turnkey, quick fix solutions using file synchronisation services and such, or you can opt for a local system and take media home each day - but come one, are these genuine disaster recovery strategies?
Things were made a lot simpler when Amazon announced S3 and gave the world cheap as chips data storage in the cloud. Okay, so it’s a little techie to get to grips with but the folks at JungleDisk took the heavy lifting out and gave us a really neat way to use S3 for automated data backup.
Well they just went one better…
Most web developers (freelance or small agency) will tell you they live in a suspended state of disaster denial. In other words, they are aware they host dozens of websites, email servers and databases for their clients. Sure, they have the original website files (somewhere), and every now and then they run a server backup and put the zip files onto a laptop somewhere.
They may even, from time to time, backup some databases. But by and large they will mostly say - ‘if we had a serious server failure our business would be crippled’.
You would be forgiven for asking why on earth anyone would live with such a looming shadow, but the reality is we’ve become so complacent because of the rock solid reliability of servers that we genuinely believe it won’t happen to us.
Well, now you really don’t need to take such a gamble. JungleDisk have just released their server edition into public beta. It’s currently free to download (both server and management app) and will remain so, for 30 days after the beta period ends.
To use JungleDisk Server Edition you will require root access to your server. The installation is painless, a single binary into /usr/bin, a xml configuration file into /etc and you’re away. Load up the management tool on the computer of your choice and configure your backups.
Because subsequent backups only add or remove - added, changed or deleted files, your data footprint is kept as low as possible, keeping your S3 costs down. It also means your backups will run much, much quicker.
Pricing has not yet been confirmed but the suggestion is 4-5 dollars per server + S3 data costs. In other words, coppers. Everything of course happens in the background and the only knowledge you will have of it is the daily log email you get indicating success or failure.
When disaster strikes and your hosting partner tells you the server’s hard drive died - you can re-image the new server and be operational within hours.
Compelling? Then what are you waiting for check out - Announcing The Jungle Disk Server Edition