I have been looking for an online backup service to backup my personal data (documents, photos, videos etc.) and so far having seen all the options, I think a shared hosting account with tons of space or Amazon S3 would fit in perfectly with my requirements (got at least 40gb data to be backed up and would increase even further).

Majority of the data would be uploaded once and would just sit there unless my computer crashes. It would be best if the host also performs weekly/monthly backups to ensure some form of redundancy.

Based on above requirement, which one (shared hosting or Amazon S3) do you think would fit in perfectly and would turn out to be cheaper in the long run, especially since I am looking for a service which is easy to use and preferably includes auto resume while uploading.

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I would just go with an external HD, or adding another one to your machine.. You can get an external for next to nothing these days, and a 200 gig external hd for less then 150$

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I already have two internal HDDs, however couple of years ago the two drives I had at that time, crashed at the same time (hard crash) and I lost little over 16GB worth of photographs.

In the past I have taken backups on DVDs as well, but sometimes the DVD doesn’t work after a while so I am a little hesitant about them. Add to this, I think it would be a good idea to have an off site backup option, since the photographs I click are not only memories for me, they are also important in running my sites.

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Why most forums fail within 1 year!

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That's the good thing about an external HD. You don't have to have it on all the time. Just turn it on when you need to upload some data.

If you are just looking for a backup of your images, then I would use a host. I would add a small image hosting script like imageshack for the display images, then you could make a folder for the raw images as well.

This would do a few things, depending on the script, it would help organize the photo's, they would be in folders. It would also help build links to w/e url you want, maybe a sub-directory of your personal/buisness blog..

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That might just work as well; in any case I can get a USB adapter for my internal HDD and make it an external one.

Actually I don’t want to do that, because the images will be in full resolution (4mp onward) and wouldn’t be watermarked, so I don’t want to expose them on the internet. Even with a shared hosting account, I was planning to store the files outside public_html folder so as to ensure that bots wouldn’t be able to crawl them.

It would actually end up costing me more than S3 and that too if I use the entire 100B they promise. For 40GB it would cost me more 4times more than S3, since they don’t offer custom plans and their base plan is only of 10GB and next one for 1000gb.

I was actually thinking about doing that, however I have been told by a few that few hosts might not allow the account to be used for backups.

I have also found a service called mozy, which offers unlimited backup space for US$5 a month, however it is the unlimited tag that I am unable to digest.

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Why most forums fail within 1 year!

India Travel Forum | India Travel Directory | Free Travel Directory

Yup that thing is the sole reason I haven't yet tried it, S3 is good and offers backup space for 15 cents per gb, however they also charge for upload and download bandwidth and get requests. Which means the month you initially upload majority of the data or download, it can end up costing quite a bit.

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Why most forums fail within 1 year!

India Travel Forum | India Travel Directory | Free Travel Directory