Backup your data to ‘The Cloud’

A review of Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk

I’ve been hunting for a solution that would enable me to perform offsite backups of important information from my various home computers easily and economically. I have experimented with external hard drives but find it hard to remember to take the drive offsite after a backup and to bring it back again when I need to capture more data.

Also, I would like a solution that would enable me to access my files from any internet connected PC.
I was listening to a Security Now podcast from the TWIT Network that was talking about using a product called Jungle Disk with the Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service and it sounded like the very thing I was after.

Amazon S3 is a data storage service that allows you to store any amount of data securely online. It is extremely inexpensive with a cost of US 15 cents per GB stored per month and a bandwidth charge of US 10 cents per GB transferred in and US 18 cents per GB transferred out.

S3 utilises Amazon’s existing storage backbone used in Amazon’s own network which ensures it is fast, reliable and full of redundancy.

S3 has no user interface but instead uses a SOAP and REST API intended for integrating the service into other products. This is great for developers, but means the service is out of reach for the average home user. This is where JungleDisk comes in.

Jungle Disk is a tool that enables you to map a regular network drive to your Amazon S3 service. This allows you to interact with your storage just like any other drive on your computer. JungleDisk comes with a reasonably powerful backup solution enabling scheduled backups of nominated files and directories. If however you prefer to use your existing backup solution you can simply point it to the Jungle Disk mapped drive and have the data sent to the Cloud.

Jungle Disk has built in encryption allowing files to be encrypted before being sent to Amazon ensuring your data remains yours.

Jungle Disk is also very inexpensive – a 1 off $US20 fee entitles you to install the software on as many computers as you like linked to the one S3 account.

I have been using the service for a few weeks now and can’t fault it. The 2 products combine to create a solution that is easy to use, easy to integrate, and very cost effective. I highly recommend it.