Online Backup: Amazon S3 + Jungle Disk
Everyone has stuff that should be backed up. I know everyone worries about loosing their photos in a fire or flood ( I even did surveys on it in college) but what if it was a simple hard drive crash that wiped out your digital archive. Years of digital camera photos gone from one good virus. CD’s are a good option, but cmon who really has the time or the discipline to burn a dozen CD’s every week or month. Online backup should be cheap and easy. This is exactly what you can do using the Amazon S3 service and Jungle disk. There are other solutions out there that try to allow this ( Life Hacker Online Backup) but I think the beauty of these two combined services is that they are both built to be enterprise level applications.
The core of Jungle disk is Amazon S3 service which is designed to be a complete storage solution for developers of web applications. S3 is fast, reliable, and cheap. Data can be stored for $0.15 per gb and it is accessable through Amazon’s world wide network. There is no maximum to worry about and even if you load it up with 100GB it will only cost $15 per month. Presently I have several gigabytes of photos stored on the service and I get a bill for less than $1 each month. Not bad!!
Jungle Disk allows you to use your S3 service as a mapped network drive. The system handles scheduled backups automatically for you and can even backup mapped network drives. The system even allows you to encrypt your files on the way up and down from Amazon to insure that no one can access your financial statements or receipts. Jungle disk can handle multiple buckets from the same S3 account which can help keep files more organized. The product is very reasonably priced at $20. Jungle disk is not only a great networked drive, but takes the place of a shared drive for most needs.
Using the Portable Install of Jungle disk that runs on a USB thumb drive it is no big deal to launch the program from any location. You can be at a friends house and add MP3’s to your collection or show them pictures from your recent trip. You can also access any important files from work, school or a public internet cafe.
I’ve used many other systems for managing online drives and backup solutions. Jungle disk is by far the fastest and easiest to use.
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[...] network drive with 20 - 40 gb of data on it; jungle disk is the way to go. For more details on Jungle Disk see my previous post. Written by Nick in: Work From Home | Tags: distributed working, file sharing, Work From [...]