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In terms of very basic functionality, I was pleasantly surprised to find that AWS' basic command line interface supports something at least comparable to rsync, and setting up my own backups for this sort of data was pretty trivial. If you want to encrypt it locally (server-side is an option, but wouldn't really work with my threat model), that might get a bit more complicated, but I was originally expecting it to require actually writing scripts.
Ooh, strong point in favor of AWS. If you don't mind sharing, what AWS storage type are you using? What's your data size, rate, and cost?
I mostly use it as an offsite backup for unchanging things like family photos and such (a few hundred gigabytes total), not as primarily-accessible storage, so I use
STANDARD_IAwhich is a bit more expensive to read. I think I've determined that it'll cost an extra month or two to actually pull the entire backup were that ever necessary, but at the scale in question that's still pretty reasonable. Cost is somewhere around $100/year.I did do some finagling on the bucket setup and access token permissions to make the contents versioned (can't be completely overwritten) and prevent my CLI instance from deleting things accidentally.
From what I hear, the AWS S3 API is basically the same as many of its competitors (dunno about the CLI tool), and I have friends that swear by BackBlaze (which is free to retrieve). I figure if AWS has much more incentive to worry about bit-rot than an HDD in the closet, and if they starts losing data we're probably in a shooting war or something catastrophic.
On the other hand, I've had family members burned by storing things in bank safe deposit boxes in the past because of issues at the bank, while their houses were safe. Could have been the other way around, sure, but with digital data it's easy enough to make copies.
Great info. Thanks for sharing!
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