A gentleman by the name of Jeremy Zawodny has published a couple of excellent blog articles outlining his plans to replace a home backup server with a service provided by Amazon known as S3 (stands for Simple Storage Service).
S3 is a hosted storage system that Amazon has released in the form of Web services that allow virtually anyone to use their storage on a "pay by the drink" basis. Their pricing is very reasonable-- US $0.15/GB per month for the storage, and US $0.20/GB to transfer the data to and from S3.
Jeremy's first posting outlines a cost justification for using S3 over maintaining a home backup server, and he does a great job of analyzing the costs (including electric use and the cost of the server)--in a nutshell, he shows that 5 years of backups on a home server is $2,275 assuming that no hardware maintenance is required, vs. $1,688 using S3 (assuming pretty hefty storage growth rates, from 125GB to 200GB).
Jeremy's second posting contains a list of utilities that backup local data using S3, most of which are free. I will definitely check them out, and kudos to Mr. Zawodny for some very useful and interesting thinking!
Replacing my home backup server with Amazon's S3
A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools
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