A little bit ago, I started to think about different backup strategies for the information that I do not wish to lose in case of drive failures or fires. This includes important applications, music and photos. At first I was looking at NAS, but I really don’t want to admin that and I did like the idea of offsite storage. Plus, after a double hard drive failure a few years back, all it takes is one good spike to take everything out.

Having worked in a cloud based company, I realized that someone must have a cheap solution to my problem. I quickly started looking at the prime players: Amazon’s S3, Google Docs, Carbonite, and Mozy. I quickly removed Mozy and Carbonite from the list as I wanted incremental backup without deleting files I delete locally (I wanted true persistent storage). This left Google Docs and S3. Actually, Skydrive from Microsoft was also an option, but 25g (even though free) just wasn’t enough for me.

Comparing prices and who I’m already deeply entwined with, Google docs won. For $100 USD I get 400gigs of online storage. That’s a hard price to beat. The only issue left to me was the interface. Google docs is not designed for exactly what I needed but it does have a fairly robust API.

Thankfully I didn’t need to write the app I wanted, gladinet already exists and it was cheap enough to qualify as an impulse buy. So far, it meets all my needs and then some. It took a minute to set up. The interface, while not perfect, is easy enough to figure out. And it’s not a resource hog. What’s not to love?

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