SansPoint

A while back, I ran OnyX to clean up my desktop a bit, and got a horrifying disc error dialog. Though I have not experienced any problems, I was worried enough to get my hands on Diskwarrior, and ran it. It fixed some problems, and though I’ve yet to run OnyX again (that’ll be this weekend), it got me worried about losing all my precious data. This includes a hypermassive music collection, documents of my writing, homework, and other personal projects, and other fun things.

I figured I had one major option: shell out more money I don’t have for a second external hard drive.^[1] Hearing the horror stories of not having stuff backed up on two consecutive episodes of The Merlin Show, I realized I ought to do SOMETHING.

Turns out, Amazon offers a web-based backup service, that can hold any amount you need, and charges $.15 per gigabyte each month for storage and $.20 a month afterwards. Compared to an external backup drive, that’s cheap, and I can access it from almost anywhere with Internet access. I can backup both my mini and my iBook, and not break the bank.

So, I’m now in the process of uploading my data. It’s going to be a while, but once it’s done, I’ll feel a lot safer.

UPDATE: Since it would take 101 days at my current upload speed to put my music collection up on S3, I decided to skip that. At least my docs are safe now. I’ll have to get an external HD after all, but this is a good temporary solution.

1. I’d make sure to avoid LaCie. Though my mini Companion has served me well as a primary boot drive, I’ve heard enough horror stories to make me want to avoid trying again. It also runs kinda hot. ↩