Adam Turner
Friday, 07 March 2008 19:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
After struggling to recreate my Windows backup regime on Ubuntu and now
Leopard, Amazon's S3 unlimited online storage offers the perfect
multi-platform solution when combined with Jungle Disk.
Jungle Disk is backup software that connects to Amazon's online
Simple Storage Service (S3).
The online service offers unlimited storage capacity on
enterprise-grade data centres spread across the US and Europe. Amazon
charges a mere 15 US cents per gigabyte for data storage and you only
pay for what you use. Amazon also charges 10 US cents per GB of data
uploaded and 18 cents per GB downloaded (a premium you'd be more than
happy to pay should you ever need to call on it for file recovery).
File sizes are limited to 5
GB. There are no sign-up or ongoing charges, meaning you can happily
backup multiple computers for only a few dollars a month. Only a few
years ago such a service might have cost hundreds of dollars per month.
Of course there are also your ISP's bandwidth charges to allow
for, so take care if you're charged for uploads.
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
