Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

JungleDisk: Backup your data on the Amazon S3 Cloud

I've been thinking for quite some time about creating an online storage system, similar to time machine but instead of backing up against an external HD, it backs up against a cloud service such as aws.amazon.com/s3 S3, in order to provide worldwide availability to my data.

Its a pretty neat idea, and today I realized that it had already been done, and done with class its called JungleDisk. JungleDisk for a low fee of $20 allows you to download a client, it supports Mac, Windows and Linux and allows you to backup using the S3 Cloud.

The OSX client, allows you to seamlessly backup at regular intervals, or/and use your S3 account as a network attached storage device. S3 is cheap: 1GB/month costs only 0.15$. So if I where to backup my home directory, currently 100 something GB, I calculated it would only cost me round £100 to keep it on amazon/annually.

I'm keeping my 1TB external storage for time machine for now, I think JungleDisk would be very useful if I were to move/travel abroad then I could keep my backup on S3, and in any contingencies restore when I'm in need.

Another good online Backup software is Carbonite.