The Road to Leopard: Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk deliver me from the backup wilderness

Adam Turner
Friday, 07 March 2008 18:56

Opinion and Analysis

The icing on the cake is that for an extra $US1 a month, Jungle Disk Plus offers the ability to access your files from any web browser without the need to install software or plugins. You can upload and download files through the web interface as well as create new directories, but you can't edit files in a browser. This is awesome. It means that my house could blow up, taking all my computers and my network storage drive with it, and I could sit down at any computer with internet access and pick up work where I left off. When you work for yourself, and have regular deadlines to meet, such an insurance policy certainly gives you peace of mind.

Amazon's S3 is used by large organisations as the backend of a web presence, but its insanely low pricing combined with Jungle Disk's ease of use makes it an excellent option for small office and home office users. Even consumers would find in perfect for backing up photo, music and video collections online and I'm thinking about recommending the service to a few friends for exactly such purposes. If you can't afford to lose it, you can certainly afford to store it on S3.

As for work, recently I've been using Google Docs to write articles - which auto-saves every few minutes and also offers the ability to easily jump between computers and operating systems. I'm keen to embrace more online apps, but what makes me nervous about using Google Docs is that I don't have an offline backup. Online word processors such as Zoho have started to offer such features (ironically using the Google Gears browser plug-in) but I haven't yet come across one I'm happy with. Zoho has potential, as does Buzzword running with Adobe AIR.

I went looking for an online word processor that could access files within an S3 account (which could then be sync'd to a desktop) but I didn't find anything. One would assume when the Google Drive eventually sees the light of day it will be very similar to S3. One would also assume it will be compatible with Google Docs. This sounds like the best of both worlds and I'm sure it's only a matter of time. Meanwhile, S3 and Jungle Disk have taken me one step closer to full OS independence.

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