Head over to Flig.ht Data and check it out!

UPDATE: Yeah, that didn’t go anywhere on it’s own. But stay tuned for a serious aviation player to re-launch it.

Prepare the System:

In order to install the s3sync tools you will need ruby and libopenssl-ruby to be installed on your system. I will be using the yum command found on Fedora and RHEL. If you use a ubuntu or some other debian system, simply substitute the command apt-get for yum. In addition, I like nano for this type of editing, substitute a text editor of your choice.

Install ruby (note, on some systems, libopenssl-ruby may be part of the ruby package, in which case, it will tell you that it cannot be found. That’s ok, it installed as part of ruby):

$> yum install ruby libopenssl-ruby

Now check and make sure that worked, the exact version isn’t important as long as it is 1.8.4 or greater:

$> ruby --version
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [i386-linux]

Once you have ruby, download and unzip the s3sync package. You should probably do this in a location that makes sense for saving a program, like /usr/bin, or similar. Well also clean up after ourselves and delete the now useless archive:

$> wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ServEdge_pub/s3sync/s3sync.tar.gz
$> tar xvzf s3sync.tar.gz
$> rm s3sync.tar.gz

Configure s3sync:

With s3sync installed, you need to configure it to work with your amazon S3 settings. The first step is to download and install encryption certificates:

$> mkdir certs
$> cd certs
$> wget http://mirbsd.mirsolutions.de/cvs.cgi/~checkout~/src/etc/ssl.certs.shar

Note the trailing ~ on the token ~checkout~. Without this extra tilde, the checkout will not work.

Finally, you need to set up the configuration file with you S3 access key ID and secret access key:

$> cd ..                  // Gets us back to the 's3sync' directory
$> nano s3config.yml.example

Fill in the access key and secret key, as well as the certificate path, something like /usr/bin/s3sync/certs (assuming you followed my location). Save the file as s3config.yml.

Once the configuration is completed, you need to tell s3sync where the config file lives. In addition, we’ll alias the s3sync and s3cmd instructions so that they can be used anywhere in the shell, just like any other command. To do this, we’ll open the .bash_profile configuration file and add a few lines.

$> cd ~
$> nano .bash_profile

Once in the file, add the following lines:

# S3sync section
export S3CONF="/usr/bin/s3sync"
alias s3cmd="/usr/bin/s3sync/s3cmd.rb"
alias s3sync="/usr/bin/s3sync/s3sync.rb"

Log out and back in (or touch the file) and you should be all set up to run s3sync and s3cmd.

Test the Install:

Now that we’re through the hard part of setting up s3sync, we just need to test out our install. Take a shot of something spirituous, close your eyes, and test s3sync by typing:

$> ./s3cmd.rb
Need a command (etc)
s3cmd.rb . . .

Congratulations! You’re ready to become a lean, mean, backed-up machine.

Special thanks to John Eberly, for his brilliant article, upon which this section is heavily based.

The ‘Simple Storage Service’:

To quote the Simple Storage Service (S3) website:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

In plainer language, S3 is unlimited storage space at rock bottom prices. It’s also fast. Really fast. In fact, it’s so fast that your server will probably be the limiting link in how fast you can send data. But that’s ok, because when we are done, the backup process will run in the background

The cost:

“Pretty nifty,” you say to yourself, “but how much does all this ‘computing in the cloud’ goodness cost?” An excellent question.

While the S3 rates are subject to change, at the current rates, 10 GB — yes you read that correctly, 10 Gigabytes — of monthly storage with 20 GB of monthly transfer would cost you about US$3.50 per month. Rates are slightly higher in Europe. In addition, Amazon provides a nice little calculator to help you figure out the damage.

The Set-Up:

So how do you get started backing up with the Amazon S3 service? Very simply. Simply sign up for an account and then follow one of the links below to a tutorial.