So you are diligent about backups. You have an external hard drive, and maybe you even backup your digital photos to CD or DVD, but where do you keep them? If the answer is in your house, you are not really fully backed up. Sure, you are ready for the inevitable hard drive crash, but what about fire or burglary?

You are reading the words of someone who has lost everything to a fire. Luckily, I was young and didn’t have a lot at the time. My parents lost far more when our house burned down between my sophomore and junior years of high school. It still taught me a lot about the impermanence of things though, and it is a lesson I carry with me through my life. Nevertheless, I get lazy. I am a photographer by hobby and I have thousands of digital photographs stored on my computer. I am fairly good about backing them up to external hard drives, and in OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Apple has made that process even easier with Time Machine

External backups are of limited use in some circumstances though. Take for example this last Autumn when I was traveling in Italy with Lisa. We were in Siena when my cell phone rang, our home number on the caller ID. There was no one expected in the house, and sure enough it was our home alarm system calling. A quick calculation told me it was just after 4:00 AM back home in Denver. The next call was from our monitoring company who dispatched the police to check things out. We were having lunch between the calls while I thought about what could be happening at home. Someone broke in through a window and set off a motion detector, a spider walked across a sensor, the possibilities were endless.

As I ran through them, however, one thing came to the front of my mind. Before we left I had done a backup of my 2007 digital photos, about 7000 RAW images cataloged in Adobe Lightroom, but I left the hard drive I had backed them up on sitting on top of my PowerMac G5. If anyone had broken into the house, they were likely to take the computer, AND the backup drive sitting on top of it. All my photos would be gone. Sure, I have uploaded some of them to flickr, but those are JPEGs, and much less useful than the original RAW files.

Fortunately, the police, and a friend, later confirmed that everything at home was fine. The alarm was more likely the work of the spider than the burglar. Yet the whole situation got me thinking again. Did I need to be more diligent about burning DVDs and putting them in the garage? How good was that solution anyway? Should I get a safety deposit box and start storing hard drive and optical backups there? These solutions seemed old fashioned in the age of cloud computing. After all, moving physical media around almost made me hear modem handshakes in my mind.

I had been aware of Amazon’s S3 storage service for some time, and I knew that the Jungle Disk was a decent interface for it that worked on the Mac. However, I just assumed that bandwidth was still prohibitive to getting the kind of data that I have backed up offsite through my DSL connection. However, I got to thinking about the amount of data I now move over my line anyway. I buy TV shows from iTunes, and rent HD movies with my Apple TV. How bad could it be to backup 60-80 GB of data to S3 storage? It turns out to be pretty reasonable if you can break your initial uploads into chunks.

I decided to use the Jungle Disk interface to S3. The program is $20, and I splurged for the plus service for an additional $1 per month to get resumable uploads and web access to my files. I am doing my initial uploads by year, to ease the pain of getting my data up there. It will likely take close to a month to get my 60 GB of RAW photos and Lightroom catalogs uploaded, but I will then have a secure, offsite backup that I can access from my multiple Macs, and the web, if needed, and all at a reasonable price. To store my current 60 GB of photos on S3, it will cost me about $9 per month. It will cost me another $6 in transfer costs to get it there. By the end of this year, I am likely to have 80 GB in photos, and that will raise my monthly cost to $12 per month, with another couple bucks in initial transfers to get it there.

Some of you might think this is not small change, and that $12 Per month can add up fast. However, I see this as quite a bargain. I have a lot invested in photography equipment and have spent countless more dollars on destinations where I have taken photos. My photos are priceless, and extremely mutable as digital files. S3 storage costs are a small price to pay for backing them up in the cloud. I realize that my storage needs will grow year after year, but I also believe that S3 prices will likely fall to keep the overall cost relatively linear over time.

tags: amazon | backup | cloud | lightroom | photos | s3