S3 Backup FAQ

General Topics

What is Amazon S3?

S3 is an acronym for Simple Storage Service. Amazon describes S3 this way:

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.

The service itself is not accessible directly; it provides a low-level API that developers can use to build applications that use online data storage, like S3 Backup or S3 Webmaster.

What is S3 Backup?

S3 Backup is a desktop application that makes it trivial for everyone to use Amazon's impressive infrastructure for remote backups and secure online file storage.

It features encryption, compression, easy access to your backed up files and will soon have backup scheduling built in. It is not restricted to backups however – you can use it to arbitrarily upload and download files and folders, which makes it a good choice for generic private online storage. Try it if you often need to access and edit some files from different computers (for ex. at home and at work).

Currently S3 Backup is in beta testing stage and runs only on Windows, but Mac and UNIX versions are coming soon.

Who can use S3 Backup?

S3 Backup is built to be very simple to use. User interface is friendly with step-by-step wizards that place your decisions in context. Even if you didn't know anything about backups before you can just start the application, make choices you are presented with and rest confident that your data are stored privately and safe from harm. If you are a power-user you still can dig deeper and set everything up exactly the way you wanted.

If you are interested in backup for your business, see section for business customers.

How much does it cost?

The pricing of Amazon S3 is as follows:

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
- $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
- $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
- $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
- $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
- $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
- $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests
- No charge for delete requests

This is really impressive as the competition is 5–50× times more expensive while not nearly as reliable.

While in beta S3 Backup itself is free. The price of the final version is expected to be really affordable if not free altogether.

Reliablity and Failure Recovery

Where and how my data are stored?

When you use S3 Backup the application communicates directly with Amazon servers.

How reliable is this storage? What if a natural disaster occurs?

Amazon uses multiple geo-distributed datacenters and your data are replicated through the system. This means that even if one of the datacenters will be swept from the surface of Earth by a tornado your data would still be intact. This is something no other remote backup solution can offer.

Remember, S3 is a system that Amazon, a Fortune 500 company, uses to run its own business-critical operations, this guarantees the durability of your data.

Security and Encryption

I need to back up sensitive information. Who can access my data?

When you use S3 Backup you don't have to worry about people who manage the servers. S3 Backup has an option to encrypt all your data with Blowfish or AES. The latter is a heavily tested 256bit cipher accepted by NIST in 2001 after a 5-year standardization process. It was approved by NSA for protection of US Government TOP SECRET information.

The result is that your data are absolutely secure – not just hackers, even datacenter operators or Government can't decrypt your data, not even if they wanted to.

I can't trust other users of my computer; can they access my online storage?

No, they can't if you have selected to protect your account with a password. It's as easy as clicking a checkbox and your credentials are encrypted with Blowfish. If someone doesn't know your password, he won't be able even to see a remote file listing, period.

If the untrusted party doesn't have administrative privileges on that machine, you don't even need to use a password – account configuration is stored in a user-specific location accessible only to you and local admins.

What is the storage format used?

See a page on stream codecs for more info.

Errors and Connectivity

How error-proof is Amazon S3?

Errors can sometimes happen, it's a normal occurrence in any complex system and the client software should be able to intelligently handle it. Since beta 7 S3 Backup uses an exponential falloff while retrying as recommended by Amazon. The retry logic is built in on the very low level and it corrects all errors without ever requiring user intervention.

So even while the service itself is not error-free that doesn't affect you as a user. Every operation is atomic and with the retry logic in place data don't get ever corrupted. If you are going to use any other applications working with S3 you should make sure they have been tested for stability in case of server-error and that they have reliable retry logic.

How does S3 Backup handle connection errors? (For ex. when uploading on a flaky connection.)

While uploading, connection errors are handled the same way servers errors are -- by retrying with exponential falloff (that is, sequentially in 0, 5, 10 and 20 seconds), if the connection is still broken the operation will be canceled and you will get an error message notifying you of failure. In future versions downloading will have retry logic for connection errors as well.

I want to know of every request that S3 Backup sends to Amazon.

You can, just pop up debug log, it's in the menu under Help → Show debug log (Ctrl+L). It reports all requests sent to Amazon and other detailed information that could be of interest to the more technical users of this software. This console will also pop up when the application issues a warning (for ex. when retrying a request) or an error, this is better than using modal message windows for many reasons, most noticeable being that it's far less intrusive.

How to report errors?

Open debug log (shortcut: Ctrl+L) and copy relevant lines
Open instant feedback window (menu: Help → Instant feedback)
Enter your name and email. If you want to send report anonymously, you can leave these fields empty
Explain the error and how it occurred. Include the log you've copied before
Press «Send» and you're done.
Thank you!

Features and Future Development

This section is incomplete; we'll be updating it soon

How do I suggest a feature?

Business Customers

Can I use S3 Backup for corporate backup?

Yes. If it's just a matter of backing up contents of a few computers, you can use it as is.

However if you need to back up multiple computers, servers, if some data in the backup shouldn't be accessed by your employees etc, then we recommend you to use a custom backup solution based on S3 Backup. Contact us with a description of backup process you need and we will see how we can adjust S3 Backup to your needs. Don't hold back if you think it will be too expensive – you would surely prefer to afford this instead of managing your own offsite backups or loosing your data altogether.

We're a really big company and we want to use Amazon S3 for our offsite backups.

Then you should buy a source license for S3 Backup and either let your IT department customize it or have us do it for you.

Using a proven online backup solution as a basis for your own backup system is a smart move because it saves time, money and dramatically reduces risk that is inherent in developing complex software like this in-house. This is a one of a kind offer.