Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

This post from Jason Bock reminded me that I never followed up on my Amazon S3 backup plan.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was ditching JungleDisk to use S3Drive because it didn’t cache the files locally, and it mirrored my file structure with no encryption which makes it convenient to use.

After trying to backup my files with S3 Drive, I’ve now made the switch back to JungleDisk, primarily because the file transfer speeds with S3Drive were horrendous (~2k/sec).  At those speeds doing a backup of all our pictures would have taken days upon days.

JungleDisk has also had a couple releases since then and made some improvements.  I also turned the cache down to 100MB, so while its still caching files, its not going to eat away my hard drive while I’m backing stuff up, and they’ve said they are considering an option to turn off the cache completely.

And, while the encryption of my files is less convenient in the sense that I now need JungleDisk to read my S3 files, its not a bad trade off to make considering that my files are more secure.

So my setup is: JungleDisk to interface with S3 account and Robocopy to actually manage the backup process.  Heres my robocopy command line setup too, with some options that work best for me:

set defaults=/MIR /XD “My Music” /XA:H /R:1 /W:2 /Z /V /XO /SEC /COPY:D /XX

robocopy.exe “PATH_TO_BACKUP” “DESTINATION_OF_BACKUP” %defaults% /LOG:LOG_FILE_PATH

/MIR – This tells Robocopy to mirror the file structure
/XD “My Music” – Excludes the “My Music” directory
/XA:H – Excludes hidden files
/R:1 – Allows for 1 retry of failed transfers
/W:2 – When retrying, wait for 2 seconds before starting again
/Z – Copy files in restartable mode to account for network glitches
/V – Turn on verbose logging
/XO – Excludes “older” files, so files that haven’t changed since the last backup won’t be transferred.
/SEC – Copy files with security
/COPY:D – Copy only file data, not other attributes
/XX – Excludes “extras”, this will delete files from S3 if they don’t exist locally

You can find a great list of all robocopy parameters here.