A Penguin in the Orchard

Use Amazon S3 to automatically back up your Mac

(Via Mac OS X Hints.)

Amazon’s S3 is an online storage solution; you pay for only what you use ($0.15/GB/month, plus some transfer costs). I wrote a simple step-by-step guide to setting you a Mac to sync with Amazon S3; here’s the executive summary version:

1. You need an Amazon Web Services account. Once signed up, you’ll need your Amazon access key and your secret key. These are what s3sync will use to authenticate you to Amazon.
2. You’ll need this zip file (1.2MB), which contains all the files you are going to need.
3. You need to create a “bucket” at Amazon to store your files. To create the bucket, you need of the S3 GUI applications that exist. I have included in the zip file the one I have used called S3 …