This is a stupid question. I want to use AWS to store/backup photo files when I am traveling. Something like 1-5 GB/day of files that I would upload and then probably not access until I returned home and downloaded them.
The Amazon website goes into much detail about APIs and buckets and consulting solutions, without providing a clear answer to the question of how someone who wants to use AWS for straightforward personal file storage and retrieval should go about it. Google hasn’t been much help either, but maybe I asked the wrong questions.
I have an AWS account. Can anyone recommend an easy to use, inexpensive AWS front end that would work for my purposes? Does Amazon really have a browser based UI for this purpose, as someone suggested to me? I am grateful for any help.
Jungle Disk?
DropBox is a front end to AWS storage (S3). I went with it because it supports Linux, Windows, OS X and iOS.
Before deciding on DropBox, I tried several S3 filesystems, but in the end DropBox was too easy to use.
Yeah dropbox is pretty good but why not eliminate the middle man. You want the files on your computer why not just send em’ there? Why go through the double transfer.
Now I just run a webserver on port 90 but I yam a genius web guy who can write php upload junk. You can run an FTP server quite easily and after you get that set up you can send all your stuff right to your machine. There are quite a few windows FTP servers, here is one:
http://filezilla-project.org/
PenGun,
Yeah, but the AWS storage is how many orders of magnitude more reliable in the face of disk errors than your average home computer?
Thanks for the replies. It looks like either Jungle Disk or Dropbox would do the job.
Pengun, I generally turn off my home computers when I am away, and as Kirk notes AWS is much more reliable.
Dropbox is outstanding, I use it quite a lot.
Kirk.
I doubt ‘orders of magnitude” is a useful measure. Still the average home machine is perhaps less reliable than a web service. I would expect Jonathan to have a somewhat better machine than average.
I ran servers for quite a few years and my machine is probably close to web service reliability and does run 24/7. I would have to implement a better backup regime to be seriously in the game but just having a bunch of server level hard-drives works for me.
If you have an amazon prime account you already have 5GB of free storage that is accessible from web or a desktop application that embeds in your context menu. You can right-click on a file or folder and upload it to the cloud storage.
You can more storage for a charge of course. 50gb for $25 a year, etc.
I am a bit puzzled as to why you want to do this. I assume you have a laptop to load the pictures onto and to access the internet. Why not just keep the pics on it? A 1 terabyte portable hard drive is cheap and much faster than speeds you will normally encounter on the internet. As well upload speed for most connections are considerably slower than download speed. It will take a long time to upload stuff, for 5 Gig a very long time on a normal connection.
Because laptops are fragile and prone to loss and theft, and one tends to keep one’s portable HD in the same place as one’s memory cards and laptop while traveling. An offsite backup is cheap insurance.
It appears that Google has Dropbox in it’s sights. You can now attach a 10G file to your mail.
Just mail your photos to yourself, assuming you have a gmail account.