Using JungleDisk
Jack Lail posted about JungleDisk the other day; it sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.
I like it.
The idea is pretty simple, at least in the abstract: using Amazon's S3 online storage service, JungleDisk maps an online storage location to a drive letter on your PC. This provides a highly reliable, highly stable online location to store your stuff; JungleDisk is very well-suited for online storage of documents you might need to access from many locations, and it provides a safe location for off-site backup.
The main drawback to using JungleDisk for backups has nothing to do with JungleDisk at all -- the upload speed on residential (and many business) Internet connections is the main bottleneck, and that limitation prevents me from uploading the gobs of data I'd really like to store off-site. I have about 80 GB of music, about 30 GB of photographs, and a rapidly growing amount of video, but my upload speed with Charter is only about 500 kbps. At that rate, it would take five and a half days just to upload my photos.
For smaller amounts of data on a less ambitious scale, JungleDisk performs beautifully. It's relatively seamless and transparent for applications that play well with mapped network drives. It's an ideal way to store documents and the like, and its scheduled backup functionality works very well.
JungleDisk can be configured to preserve an archived copy of deleted files, which protects against accidental deletion. It can also keep version histories of your files, so you can revert back to an earlier version of a file if you screw something up. I love that.
The user also has the option to encrypt everything before it's uploaded, using the industry (and government) standard AES encryption protocol. This rocks. Client-side encryption means that your data is not viewable even by the folks at Amazon's datacenters (where the data is actually stored). If you choose to encrypt everything, only you can view the contents of anything you store.
JungleDisk allows you to upload any kind of file, and it has no limitations on storage or traffic. You're simply charged for the storage and traffic you use. The charges are quite reasonable, too: fifteen cents per gigabyte per month for storage, ten cents per downloaded gigabyte per month, and eighteen cents per uploaded gigabyte per month. Those charges are from Amazon, not JungleDisk, so you have to set up an Amazon S3 account before creating your JungleDisk account.
The JungleDisk client software has a one-time cost of $20; the optional JungleDisk Plus features (which I highly recommend) add another $1 per month in addition to storage costs. The Plus version allows partial uploads to be resumed, and it features block-level uploads as well. That last feature means that JungleDisk only uploads the portions of large files that have actually changed. Instead of uploading a new copy of a 10 MB file you just edited, it will only upload those blocks of data that have changed from the previous version. This could represent a huge savings in transfer costs for really active users.
I've been happy with it so far (given my upload bandwidth limitations), and I intend to keep experimenting with it.