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Seeking Nerdvana The Road to Leopard: Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk deliver me from the backup wilderness
Seeking Nerdvana The Road to Leopard: Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk deliver me from the backup wilderness | The Road to Leopard: Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk deliver me from the backup wilderness |
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| by Adam Turner | |
| Saturday, 08 March 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 If you've already got an Amazon shopping account (and who hasn't?), it's simple to create an S3 account using the same billing details. Amazon S3's service is only half of the solution because Amazon doesn't provide the software to access it. You need software designed specifically for S3 - which is where Jungle Disk comes in. One of Jungle Disk's key strengths is that the software is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. What's really impressive is that each version offers the same interface and same full set of features, making life much easier for those of us who swap between operating systems during the day. You can also mount your S3 Jungle Disk storage area and treat it like a local drive. For someone like me who has recently moved to Leopard but is on a quest to break my dependence on any one operating system by using multi-platform apps, Jungle Disk is manna from heaven. As if this wasn't good enough, Jungle Disk costs a mere $US20. This one-off license fee allows you to run it on any number of computers, backing up to your S3 account with each computer allocated its own sub-folder or a separate ''bucket'', with optional encryption. So far I've installed Jungle Disk on my MacBook (which is now my primary work computer), the XP and Ubuntu partitions of my ThinkPad, my Vista media centre and a spare XP machine in my office. Each has gone without a hitch, although it's strange that the Mac version doesn't offer an option to automatically run at login - which would seem essential. I got around this by right-clicking on the Jungle Disk icon is the Dock and selecting "Open at Login". Out of interest, Apple's Time Machine backup feature doesn't seem to recognise the Jungle Drive. Thankfully the Windows version offers a "Start with Windows" option during installation so you can set n' forget it. Now I can access any of the backups from any of my computers via the mounted Jungle Disk drive. I can also use the Jungle Disk as an online network drive for sharing files between machines, with none of the permissions hassles that plagued me whilst configuring Ubuntu. Jungle Disk just runs quietly in the background uploading recently changed files and deleting locally deleted files if you so desire. You can throttle the upload speed so as not to impact on your web, VoIP and BitTorrent access. Backups can be run manually or automatically every 5, 15, 60 or 360 minutes, or else daily or weekly. It's annoying that you can't run multiple backup sets at different frequencies, but you can run more than one instance of the software on your computer at the same time. Surprisingly Jungle Disk doesn't seem to run missed backups or offer the option of running when you start up or shut down your computer. S3 and Jungle Disk make a powerful combination, but it gets even better. CONTINUED |
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