Amazon S3 & Koders.com

I had a vision today when signing up for Amazon S3.  Here is the background: Amazon s3 is great, cheap storage, API, scalable, reliable, accessible from anywhere (Internet capable), etc… I plan on using it for my personal backup center putting things like my personal source code library, photos, & important documents. I get everything a enterprise company gets but at my rate.  Great.

The one thing I’m dreading is maintaining folders.  Lets be frank, directories/folders are anything but proficient compared to say search.  That’s why Google beat Yahoo!.  Yahoo! was a directory, you had to drill down to find results where as for Google you searched for them. Yahoo! later changed to be a search engine but people are starting to forget the thing was directory of links, users would submit links and Yahoo! people would categorize (not so automated would you say?) 

So for Amazon S3, I’m going to have act like I work at Yahoo! back in the day, this is going to suck big time.  That’s when the revelation hit me. 

What if I could point Google or even better Koders/Krugle at my directory and search it?  That would rock except some things I don’t want public BUT I still want it searchable just by me. 

I already have my personal backup center in Amazon S3 now I need my personal search engine. I could easily write something that populates a simple html page with a directory listing of all the files I have stored/want indexed.  I would then want to login to koders to search for code/files/documents etc….

Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Amazon S3 for Backups

I’m really looking forward to Google’s version of S3, Google tends to do things better plus free ;).    Until then I’m going with Amazon S3 for my personal backup strategy.  Right now I have a media PC with a 100 Gig hard drive, that is mirrored that serves this purpose but we really don’t use it enough to justifying it running all the time.  Plus in the bigger picture of things, this just fills my life with more work that I don’t want to do. 

Links

• A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools - Mostly these are tools that work via Linux/OS X
• elastic8 - A nice list of these tools
• S3Fox - Firefox plugin - I’m probably going to be using this for my ad hoc client
• S3Drive - Provides a drive on your my computer that is your Amazon storage
• S3Browse - Uses a web interface to interact with your S3 storage.
• PutPlace - Promises to publish to S3, Flicker, etc… Still in beta
• Jungle Disk - Looks to be the premier paid software to give WebDAV support.
• I really like http://filicio.us ideas with tagging but it looks to new for me to rely on.

My Setup

I’m looking for a way to automate backups of certain folders at certain times, tag folders so I can search later on, an ad hoc way to get files.  I’m looking to backup source code files, pictures, and important documents.  For now I think I’m going with S3Fox until I find something more automated and with tagging/searching.

Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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