Jeremy wrote a nice, very instructive post on why Amazon's online backup system works out financially for him. It's really good. On a micro scale, it illustrates the costs that go into Enterprise storage solutions. People tend to get caught up in the capital aquisition and support costs, almost invariably without consideration for how much a particular solution would cost in electricity, cooling, and administrative manhours. I could say more (a lot more) about this topic, but that's work stuff, and I'd rather not blog about things so intimately involved with work (eventually, I'd just get myself in trouble).

Specific to Jeremy's post about S3, the thing that goes unspoken is Who Controls the Data. Right now, Jeremy does. And not just his, he controls a lot of mine, too. But I trust Jeremy.

But do I trust Amazon? With my Quicken data? With my Tax returns? With my porn? What kind of encryption is being used? Exactly what are they doing on the backend? What do those TOS look like?

How do the costs change if you aren't using a single purpose backup server, but instead simply have two mirrored drives on your lone PC (which you also use for general purpose PCing)? Or if you're using old hardware? If I use this Celeron powered desktop that currently serves as a footrest, for which I'd only have to buy a stick of RAM and a pair of disks, don't the costs swing back heavily into DIY's favor? And what if my juice just costs a lot less than Jeremy's? In fact, it does. Almost half.

But would any of us actually go buy new ANYTHING other than disks for a backup server? Don't we all have enough crap in a box (or in my case several boxes) to peice together a PC? I think Z's costs are exaggerrated.

A trio of 250g drives will set you back about $600. Capital costs above that shouldn't be factored in, if you are going to use hardware you already have. For me, that'd work out to about $940 over four years. Or ~$700 less than Amazon would cost.

Consider that I already have my only real data set of vaule and substantial size on Flickr ($25/yr), and it becomes simply absurd that I would even consider using S3. There is not much value in it for me. And I doubt there is for you either.