I thought I’d take this opportunity to share the message with YOU. When did you last backup? Do you have an automated backup plan? Have you tested it? Do you know you can actually recover your data, or do you just hope? Do you keep your backup drive next to your computer? How would you be affected by fire or theft?

Backup is a little bit like insurance. It’s tempting to drive without insurance, until you have a crash that is. Then, of course, the insurance seems like a bargain. Why not decide today is a good day to check over your backup procedure? Maybe even run a little test restore just to be sure.

Here’s a picture from amanky completely unrelated to backup which appeared in a flickr search for backup all the same.

However, my problem was very specific, very random, hard to reproduce, and not a major problem, just a small feature that wasn’t working. They did resolve it in the end, and every message I received was intelligent.

So, I’ve decided to stay put. I’m still keen to use S3 for media storage, but rsync.net are a better option for incremental, automated, nightly backups.

Using S3fuse (currently down) I’m sure you could script something so users log in to the EC2 instance and then mount their S3 bucket locally. Then rsync would work pretty effectively I reckon.

Could even be an interesting business model.