With the advent of Amazon S3 and its remarkably cheap storage costs, creating services based on scalable storage has never been so easy and inexpensive as it is today. One area where this is most apparent is the boom of network backup products. In years past, companies like Iron Mountain or EMC would have to create their own million-dollar server infrastructures to support client data. Now a days, you don’t need to pay for anything until you’ve collected payments from clients.

What am I getting at? This: a plethora of potentially fly-by-night or unproven backup services have gone live over the last year or two and require a bit of investigation before subscribing. Most of these services will be able to stay afloat for quite a while due to the low overhead, but my warning is to beware of the little guys until they have a track record. There is little investment on their part, often just a few lines of code and the payment system. Usually there is no mention of data security and a lack of welcome features such as having data restore to DVDs and mailed to you.

I’m not saying avoid S3 backup services, I’m recommending confirming there is a history of quality support and updates. JungleDisk is one such candidate. But you might just want to stick with inexpensive non-S3 services such as Mozy, Carbonite, and so forth.

Here’s a list I compiled of some backup titles and services leveraging Amazon S3 storage:

• Backup Manager
• S3 Backup
• S3 Solutions
• Sync2S3
• Brackup
• s3DAV
• Duplicity
• s3sync
• SetS3t Synchronize
• DropBox
• JungleDisk

Happy uploading!