Tech Stuff

I recently started using  Cloudberry’s Backup Desktop edition as my Carbonite (Online Backup) subscription is running out.  In their newest version 2.0 they have added the ability to backup to a local folder or network share.   With storage space so cheap now I would much rather backup my music and videos locally.  I just bought a 2TB external eSATA drive for $100.  The plan is to backup documents and other smaller files to Amazon S3.  So far this is working out really good.  The only thing that it is missing is version control for the local backups.  It maybe there someone in the options, but just haven’t found it yet.  I have been really happy with Cloudberry’s products and at the speed that they keep up with new functions that Amazon rolls out for S3 or Cloudfront.  I have come to rely on Clouberry S3 Explorer for managing my CloudFront distributions.

I just recently read that you can now set the TTL of an object on Amazon’s Cloudfront to 1 hr instead of the 24 hr minimum that it used to be.  I only found this out because I was reading through the discussion forums looking to see if there was an ETA of when this could be done.  Didn’t know this had been around since April.  Since Amazon didn’t include it on any of the monthly announcements of new/improved features I figured I would share.

The default for an object is still 24 hours, but you can use the HTTP Header Expires to set a different expiration.  If the time is less than an hour, Cloudfront will default to 1 hour.  I still wish there was a way to expire a given object at anytime, but this is a big step forward.  However, it would be nice if there was a tool out there that would allow me to set a default expires time period when I upload an object to S3 based on the content type.  In my case, I can usually have my images set to a 24 hour TTL, but there are some HTML, CSS and Javascript files that I would want at only an hour.  Right now I use S3Fox and Cloudberry to manage my S3 buckets.

In celebration of S3′s 3rd anniversary Amazon has announced the reduction of the transfer-in costs for data from $0.10/GB to $0.03GB for April – May 2009.  Now is the time to transfer all the home videos and music that isn’t backed up else where.

Today Amazon anounced new tiered pricing for the S3 service.

For the United States: 

Storage — Current Pricing (thru October 31st)

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Storage — New Pricing (effective November 1st)

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
• $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

It is good to see that Amazon released a pretty detailed statement detailing the events of the S3 outage on 7/20.  Some people have been complaining about the stability of the environment, but I think it has been overall really good.  When there are problems they are fixed extremely quickly and if there was going to be any delays they kept everybody up to date.  I think the Service Health Dashboard is great information tool.  I may not be happy when there is a problem, but atleast I don’t feel like I am in the dark like I have in the past with some other hosts/service providors.