s3 Backup

Neat! I posted a link to my s3backup utility to HackerNews at the announcement that codinghorror.com had lost everything. I pointed how simple it was to use my utility (or any of them) to quickly and easily backup your databases and files.

Using s3backup, you can tar up your entire vhosts directory, or push each database dump to s3. It's insanely cheap. You can store 30gb, upload 30gb and download 30gb a month for $10. And chances are, you won't be downloading anything, so its even less than that.

s3backup also requires that the database is encrypted before it will work, so you have to have gpg installed.

Also, ensure that the files you're pushing are marked private. This ensures they can't be publicly downloaded.

I noticed I had some followers now, which is pretty neat. It also opens me up to scrutiny, but thats great, it'll only make my software better.

I should note, s3backup has a few bugs, namely, there's no email notification if a backup isn't successfully pushed. So, if you're on a very slow connection, the backup can fail. It will leave the file in the local directory, but it won't notify you otherwise. It needs to attempt to repush the backup, and if that fails, notify you via email.

Thanks for following, I want to make s3backup a very used and robust utility.