Jungle Disk and Amazon S3
So, I’m using a product called Jungle Disk which is a front-end interface to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
Jungle Disk really became useful to me when they implemented automatic backup to the S3 service. Currently, I save a bunch of files which aren’t huge in size, but would be a pain in the next to lose. Using the Jungle Disk backup feature, I save almost 5GB of files to S3. The backups happen continuously, every 5 minutes to 1 hour depending on which machine we’re talking about.
How much does this cost me per month? About $1.53! Consider these advantages:
- Your files are safely stored on a server somewhere in Amazon’s data centers, far from your home. A fire, for instance, would not threaten the data you have backed up.
- You can access the files from anywhere, assuming you can remember the massively complex keys that amazon supplies you with to protect your files. Man, I miss TrueCrypt while on my Mac.
- Did I mention the ridiculously trivial cost for this?
Jungle Disk stores the backups in folders based on your computer name. In my case, my root folder is accessed via a network share in OS X. On Windows, it looks like WebDAV is used and the S3 home folder is shown in “My Network Places.”
On my Mac, for example, I can see all of the files backed up by my PC and vice versa. File copies are pretty fast, too, though it’s hard to tell since your home or work network connection plays a large part in that.
Amazon S3 can also encrypt your files, but I don’t enable that. I figure that I’m going to encrypt anything really sensitive locally myself with my own software. So, if some Amazon system administrator wants to browse my files, they could, but the files I encrypt myself should be safe.
If you were looking into a different way to backup your personal files, I definitely think you should check out S3 and JungleDisk.