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Store Your Home Inventory Data with Amazon S3

By: Kevin Sparks
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:02:36
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"What happens to all of the inventory data on your computer if it's stolen or destroyed in a disaster?" As a producer of Home Inventory Software, we often get this question when discussing our product. Although we have an answer for that (with a feature that allows users to send their data to a remote email server for off-site storage), not all applications have this functionality built-in, so a solution which could be applied consistently for all applications would be quite helpful.

Welcome Amazon S3
This back-end web service from Amazon.com provides secure, reliable, remote storage for your data on the internet for only 15 cents per gigabyte per month. There is no minimum fee, no start up fee, and you pay only for what you use. You'll pay for bandwidth costs in addition to the storage, so you don't want to be uploading the entire contents of your hard drive every day, but for simple backup of important files, you just can't find a better deal than this. As an example, you could store 100 pictures of 1 MB each for only 1.5 cents/month! Store 1000 pictures of 1 MB each for only 15 cents/month!

Set up your tools:
To get this all to work requires some setup, but the tools are all free and easy to use, and you can be backing up your data to the internet within 15 minutes. Ready to get started? Here's what you'll need to do:

  1. Create an Amazon S3 account (5 minutes). Create your account here.
  2. Install and configure Jungle Disk (5 minutes). Get Jungle Disk here. Although your data will only be accessible to you, you may want to check out the encryption options if you're planning to store sensitive data.
  3. Install and configure Net Drive (3 minutes). Get Net Drive here. Create a "New Site" and set the Site Address/URL to: http://localhost:2667/ (or the value configured in Jungle Disk). Set the Server Type to WebDav, and choose a drive letter for accessing your new remote storage.

That's all there is to it. The next time you open "My Computer", you'll see your new drive letter which looks and acts just like a hard drive on your computer. You can use this drive for backing up your Home Inventory data, as well as pictures, spreadsheets, word documents, or any other files from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes each.

Kevin Sparks is a technical writer for Kaizen Software Solutions, the producer of Home Manager, a home inventory software program. For more information, visit their website at http://www.kzsoftware.com/products/homemanager.

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