How to get the cheapest
on-line backup solution
Well, using Amazon S3 and Syncovery…
Just to say at first, I do not sell or get payed from either amazon nor syncovery for writing this blog.
The first time fee will be 60$ for the Syncovery software and depends on
how much data you need to upload to Amazon, from my experience 30Gb is around
4$.
The monthly fee will be about 1.5$ if you do not have a lot of changes.
The pricing can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
Now, follow this steps:
1.
Browse to http://aws.amazon.com and get an account for
the S3 service (you will have to give your credit card number for the monthly
payment…)
2.
Make sure you are in the S3
section
3.
Create a bucket, name it
whatever you like but it needs to be unique. As a proposal use the same start
and different ending, for example: abcdefg.pictures for the pictures backup
bucket and abcdefg.documents for the documents bucket.
Very important – the bucket name is case sensitive so make sure you know what you wrote.
Very important – the bucket name is case sensitive so make sure you know what you wrote.
4.
Then click on your name on
the upper right corner, on the drop down menu select "Security
Credentials"
You may be asked to re-login to AWS.
5.
On the section named
"Access Credentials" copy the following and save for later:
a.
Access Key ID
b.
Secret Access Key
6.
Browse to http://www.syncovery.com
a.
Download the latest edition
b.
Buy the professional
edition for 60$
7.
Create a new profile (we
will back up the pictures folder in this example)
a.
Profile Name is "S3
Pictures"
b.
On the "Left-Hand
Side", choose your source folder you want to backup (you can also click on
"Browse" and do a customized selection)
c.
Next click on "Exact
Mirror"
d. Just to be on the safe side
I keep all deleted files for extra 14 days before I delete them from Amazon,
click on "Configure" and fill
the following:
You can leave them as long as you like it will not cost you more…
e.
Now on the "Right-Hand
Side" click on "Internet" and configure the following:
i.
Protocol: Amazon S3
ii.
Bucket: the bucket name from section 3
iii.
Make sure that
"Reduced redundancy" is checked, it will be cheaper that way.
iv.
"Access ID" and
"Secret Key " should correspond to the details you saved in section
5.
v.
Now you should see on the
Right-Hand Side something like S3://abcdefg.pictures
8.
Now for the fine tuning:
a.
Schedule – schedule the job
to run every x time. You need to know that Amazon is charging by the requests
and not so much for the size (very smart…) so if you will schedule the job to
run every 2 minutes the monthly payment will be higher.
I scheduled it to run every 3 hours…
You have the option to use real-time monitoring, I didn't use it but it seems like a killer option.
I scheduled it to run every 3 hours…
You have the option to use real-time monitoring, I didn't use it but it seems like a killer option.
b.
Access & Retries – just
choose "Do not use" under Volume Shadowing, had a bit of a problem
with that feature, not because of the program but due to windows bugs…
c.
Mask & Filters – here
you can exclude in general (by mask)
d.
Safety – check the
following:
You do not need to worry if your
files are deleted because we have 14 days of backup left on Amazon…
9.
Make sure you do not have
files larger than 512Mb, if so change the program setting to allow them in the
"Rsync, S3" Tab in the Program Settings.
10.
If you want you can
configure an email to be sent to you when the backup has problems:
a.
Open Program Settings
b.
Go to Notify Tab
c.
Configure the following
checkboxes to get only errors
d.
Click on "Email
settings" on the bottom
e.
With your mail address
f.
Assuming that you have a
Gmail account hit the "Use Gmail" button and enter your credentials
in the "User ID" and "Password" fields.
That’s it you are ready to
start the initial sync…
