In an effort to replace my home backup server with Amazon's S3, I've been collecting a list of Amazon S3 compatible backup tools to look at. Here's what I've discovered, followed by my requirements.

The List

I've evaluated exactly zero of these so far. That's next.

s3sync.rb is written in Ruby as a sort of rsync clone to replace the perl script s3sync which is now abandonware. Given that I already use rsync for much of my backup system, this is highly appealing.

Backup Manager appears to now have S3 support as of version 0.7.3. It's a command-line tool for Linux (and likely other Unix-like systems).

s3DAV isn't exactly a backup tool. It's provides a WebDAV front-end (or "virtual filesystem") to S3 storage, so you could use many other backup tools with S3. Recent versions of Windows and Mac OS have WebDAV support built-in. Java is required for s3DAV.

S3 Backup is an Open Source tool for backing up to S3. It's currently available only for Windows. Mac and Linux versions appear to be planned. The UI is built on wxWidgets.

duplicity is a free Unix tool that uses S3 and the librsync library. It is written in Python but not considered suitable for backing up important data quite yet.

S3 Solutions is a list of other S3 related tools on the Amazon Developer Connection.

Brackup is a backup tool written by Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal, SixApart, memcached, perlbal, etc...). It's written in Perl, fairly new, and doesn't have a lot in the way of documentation yet.

Jungle Disk provides clients for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It also offers a local WebDAV server.

DragonDisk has Linux and Windows clients.

For those keeping track, non-S3 options suggested in the comment on my previous post are Carbonite, rsync.net, and a DreamHost account.

Are there other S3 tools that I'm missing?

Also, I've found that Amazon's S3 forum is quite helpful. The discussion there is generally of good quality and the software does the job nicely. Perhaps we should do something similar for YDN instead of using Yahoo! Groups?

My Requirements

Most of what I need to backup lives on Linux servers in a few collocation facilities around the country (Bowling Green, Ohio; San Jose, California; San Francisco, CA). My laptop and desktop windows boxes have USB backup and get automatically synced to a Unix box on a regular basis already using the excellent SyncBack SE, so I don't need to re-solve that problem.

I don't really need a fancy GUI. I'm really looking for a stand alone tool that's designed to work with S3 and keep bandwidth usage to a minimum. Alternatively, something that works at a lower level (such as a filesystem driver) to provide a "virtual drive" type of interface might work as well.

Posted by jzawodn at October 06, 2006 03:09 PM