Time Extend

Amazon’s web services are fantastic. Let me start by making that statement, very clear.

I use the Amazon S3 system to do all my off site backups, something which anyone with anything valuable should be doing. For about $3 a month - yes $3 a MONTH, I have three things backed up automatically and without my intervention:

All My Home Computers
All my Mac’s and PC’s at home automatically upload key folders and synchronise them with an amazon s3 bucket once a week. Primarily these are my images, documents and music. On a different night each week each machine will upload at the byte by byte level all changes within each directory. My brother’s iMac, Dad’s Macbook, my MacBook Pro and development PC all do this quietly, and on their own with no intervention. This is all powered by JungleDisk a product I highly recommend.

My Dedicated Server
All my websites run on a dedicated server, hosted by mediatemple. All in all I host about 12 websites, with about 20-30 databases. None are “mission-critical”, but rebuilding them all from scratch is not an experience I’d like to go through. Using Christina Warren’s superb tutorial all of the web content, all of my SVN repositories, all of my digital assets and all of the databases are automagically backed up locally, and to amazon S3 without me touching anything. Magic.

My Unfuddle Repository
Over at indieSpring we use Unfuddle on a daily basis. It’s a great alternative to Basecamp, works well with the superb Freshbooks, and makes managing our projects and clients really simple. It has built in support for Amazon S3 so all of our data gets backed up daily, along with the SVN repositories we have hosted at Unfuddle.

Having all of this backed up for $3 a month, is simply, a no brainer. We’re also actively looking at building our next multiplayer title on the Amazon cloud platform to provide unparalleled scalability as users join our games. Something we’re very excited about!

If you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them here, or drop me a line at robsandbach@gmail.com.

Technology