Remember Bruce’s post a few weeks ago about storing his iTunes Library on S3. He said he’d be willing to spend $75 a year to be able to back up his data and access it from anywhere in the world. He was all ready to sign up until the realities of S3 costing dropped into his lap. At $0.20 per GB transfer and $0.15 per GB per month storage, it would end up costing him a lot more that $75/year.

Well, there may now be a solution. Bandwagon (formerly Xacktunes) will offer unlimited S3 storage for your iTunes for only $69/year (at least as an introductory price). No, this isn’t a “take it with you anywhere” scheme, but rather a back-it-all-up so you don’t lose your purchases when your Mac dies: music, videos, audio books, plug-ins, everything. It doesn’t matter whether you rip it yourself or you buy it from iTunes.

More after the jump…

What’s nice about Bandwagon is that it’s designed for lazy people, who never really take the time or get around to backing up their music. Sure, they intend to do it–some day–but the pain of recording all that music to CD or DVD just takes up too much time. The backups are automatic and essentially invisible.

Of course, many of you readers are going to pull out your calculators and do a little math. 60 GB of data a year, at $1.80/GB at S3 prices, and whoa! That’s a pretty good savings rate. So how are these folks going to stay in business? According to Terence Pua of Xackup, the company that’s developing this service, there are several factors to consider. The $69 price point is an introductory special. It will probably go up to about $99/year after the special ends. Second, iTunes libraries vary by person. The smaller libraries may balance out the larger ones. Finally, they will be using other grid storage providers in addition to or instead of S3 once they get going.

So am I going to jump aboard? Will Bruce? I’m pretty good about my backups to hard disk, but I’m certainly going to think about this as an alternative.

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