Rebuilding twit.tv, army.twit.tv, live.twit.tv, twit.tv/forums, and leoville.com, munchcast.com is not going to be fun.
Ouch! Leo Laporte just had a major hardware failure (you can read about it in his numerous twitter updates ...). Leo was relying RAID and unfortunately it looks like he got burnt by it.
I have been using Amazon's S3 to backup important data (such as userscripts.org's database) twice a day since May 2007. Amazon sends a small bill at the end of each month (this month will be around $8). The userscripts.org database is currently 216MB, having grown from 20MB at the beginning of 2007 (both sizes are after compression). I have twice daily backups going back 16 months for less than the cost of a Pizza. More importantly for pennies per day I won't have to go through the hell that Leo is going through right now.
Amazon S3 = Happyness at $0.20/GB
The setup is simple - I used s3.rake together with a cron task to automatically run in the morning and evening. I'm being lazy and not deleting all but a couple of the 60 backups I have per month because it isn't work the couple dollars it will save.
To grab my data I use s3:// when I need to manually browse and download data (by visiting s3://uso_db_backup/). Mostly I use s3.rake's s3:retrieve:db to download the most recent database snapshot. A small script grabs the file, uncompresses then loads it into my development environment - all before my tea has finished brewing.
For the love of god, please use cloud computing resources to store anything important. Stuff breaks. S3 protects you. I pay more for utilities for my apartment than I do for my S3 account.
Put all your important data on S3. Put all your code on github. Put all your email on gmail. Put all your photos on flickr/smugmug/... (flickr is $25/year for unlimited uploads - if you don't want to overwhelm your photostream you can keep photos private by default)
While S3 isn't saving Leo's day today, it is saving my day when (not if) my server dies. On that day I will need to update userscripts.org's DNS, install a few packages via rake & capistrano, then I'll be back within a few hours - and that helps me sleep at night.
