Recently many of my friends had problems with their hard drives as well as the company I am working for. Data loss and a lot of work were the obvious results. Sometimes the backup is the reason sometimes the backup fails. There are multiple reasons for this on a bad day everything can go wrong. Murphy’s Law is a very good approximation of things which regularly happen to me in this context. So my attention was sharpened regarding good solutions to do this.
While I was writing and researching for my diploma thesis I came across a service offered by Amazon called S3. Amazon’s service (Simple Storage S3) offers the use of a harddrive in the internet. Certainly this was not new to me. I knew this service from the .Mac Apple is offering but which is much more expensive and never really came to my mind as the monthly charges were always way to high for me. 
Amazon however charges per usage and the prices are reasonable:
Storage
$0.18 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Requests
$0.012 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB), except data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe, which will be charged at regular rates.
Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead.
So I started looking into that. Nice .. Well the question remained how to access this service the easiest and most convenient way. Backups are a pain in the ass so you have to have something which does this almost automatically.
I finally came across Jungle Disk. A tool which provides a network drive which then shows up on your desktop and allows easy drag and drop operation as well as a backup functionality. Nice ! I tried is out and I have to say it works smoothly. Upload times can be a little long however the program is capable of a differential backup so only newly created and changed files will be uploaded once again.
The program still seems in the development or at least there is still development going on. The cost is a mere 20$ and this allows for a lifetime usage.
A friend of mine recently asked me about a way to prevent using a large external drive for all his data. I recommended jungle disk, and he quickly was totally satisfied with the solution. I have to admit I am as well.
Forgot to say that we are both using OSX 10.5 but the program as well as the whole solution is also available for Windows and Linux
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