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Backup 5 GB with Amazon Cloud Drive

April 26, 2011, 11:00 am

By Ryan Cordell

cloud_drawingWere there a ProfHacker headquarters (and there should be), the motto that we’d probably inscribe on our titanium doorposts would be “Backup, backup, and again backup.” We talk a lot about Dropbox, our favorite backup solution, but there are other compelling services worth considering. Recently Amazon announced Amazon Cloud Drive, an online backup solution for music, photos, videos, and documents. Amazon offers a free 5 GB of free space for anyone, and users can upgrade that space at the rate of $1 per GB per year, all the way up to 1000 GB (which would cost $1000 per year).

Amazon Cloud Drive is particularly interesting if you buy music from Amazon’s mp3 store. Amazon mp3s can be automatically added to users’ Cloud Drives (and previously purchased mp3s can be uploaded to it). Using the Amazon Cloud Player, users can listen to their uploaded music from any computer with a web connection, as well as from any Android phone with the Amazon MP3 app installed. I purchase most of my music from Amazon, and I find the idea of universal access to it compelling. To that end, I’ve begun uploading my previously purchased albums to my Cloud Drive.

If you need an off-site backup solution for a few key files—or if you’d like an extra backup of some essential items also saved elsewhere—Amazon Cloud Drive might be a good solution. I plan to use the service extensively over the next few weeks, and will write a detailed followup review here.

Bonus info: Shortly after announcing Cloud Drive, Amazon also announced that, if you purchase any mp3 album from Amazon before December 31, 2011—even an on-sale mp3 album—Amazon will automatically upgrade your Cloud Drive to 20 GB for one year.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user akakumo.]

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  • bitterlemon

    I would like to add a recommendation for Spideroak https://spideroak.com/

    I cannot recommend this service strongly enough. It gives you the basic 2GB free, but I went in for the paid plan, which with an academic discount costs $50 per year. It has saved me quite a few times.

    Some of the features that make it far superior to the other services for academic needs are:
    Cross-platform support, selective sync, selective backup of folders across multiple machines. I use it on 4 machines on Windows and Linux. The most useful feature is “de-duplication” (it might be called differently), which recognises duplicate copies of your data and saves space by not replicating it multiple times. This also works if if you have slight changes or different names for files.

    Excellent encryption and sharing make it almost perfect. The only thing missing is webdav support.

  • http://otakurean.net pp

    you guys should do a wuala review..

  • http://www.samplereality.com Mark Sample

    Amazon’s upgrade to 20 GB when you purchase an MP3 album scares me with its sheer marketing brilliance. Give the people 15 extra GB for one year. People fill up their now 20 GB Cloud Drive with music and other back-upped files. A year goes by and the complementary one-year upgrade expires. Amazon’s captive customers then either spend an inordinate amount of time pruning their Cloud Drive or spend money to buy back the 15 GB that used to be free. As I say, brilliant marketing, but it makes me skeptical about Amazon as a permanent backup solution.

  • catlkelley

    One thing to bear in mind is that the terms of agreement provide you with NO privacy at all.

    http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/no-privacy-on-amazon-8217s-cloud-drive/882

    Be careful about posting any sensitive data out there, including student work, grades, etc. Or anything at all that you don’t want Amazon snooping around in.

    I think I’ll pass.

  • Guest

    Didn’t Amazon’s cloud server just go down for 5 days?

  • http://www.club-admiralty.com/ foveros

    ZumoDrive, SugarSync and Microsoft’s SkyDrive are also options (between these and dropbox I have over 20GB of free storage on the cloud). Of course privacy and security are really important so make sure that you are FERPA compliant when you use these services.

  • http://billso.com/ Bill Sodeman

    I tried SpiderOak but found it painfully slow to sync files. I’m still using Dropbox.

  • http://billso.com/ Bill Sodeman

    It was Amazon’s EC2 data center in northern Virginia that went down last week. That outage affected companies that had a basic level of Amazon S3 service. If Foursquare, Reddit, Hootsuite and other companies had been willing to pay for higher service levels, their data would have been replicated to multiple Amazon data centers, thus avoiding the outage issues.

    http://blog.hootsuite.com/making-it-right/

    http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/129031/portions-of-new-york-times-propublica-sites-disabled-by-amazon-server-outage/

  • http://billso.com/ Bill Sodeman

    That’s a good point about FERPA compliance. Some university IT departments get picky about cloud-based services.

  • raza_khan

    I maybe overly concerned with privacy issues and especially as faculty when it comes to FERPA. Has any one talked to the administration to see if storing files that contains student information is appropriate to an external service provider. I understand that we all do save information on our personal computer or flash drives but it is presumption that we, as owners, have control of who accesses it – that is not true when storing on an external provider.

    I have tried both dropbox and spideroak before. I have had issues with slow syncing with both of them. Also, at this point, I already have about 40GB of data so anything better out there for larger storage? Any one know what sites provide stronger encryption?

    Raza
    ___________________________
    Raza Khan, Ph.D.
    dr.raza.khan@gmail.com

  • bitterlemon

    I forgot to mention, Spideroak gives 100GB for $50 (with academic discount). The slowness is only initial, as you are trying to backup a lot of data. AFAIK you can tweak some settings to let it use more bandwidth and leave your comp running all night. Usually running on your battery power also has an effect on backup programs, as some of the operations are suspended to save power.

    Based on personal experience, around 70 gigs of my backup data is squeezed to 40 gigs, leaving another 60GB of storage free, as a lot of this data is either synced or duplicated across many systems, and often also on the same system. I also use dropbox at the same time for the most important data, and back it up with spideroak (but do not sync dropbox through spideroak, as that can cause conflicts).

  • caveat

    I wonder if the faculty have contracts with this U, and if so, does  the contract have any language to support the research/publication criteria for  termination.

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