Recently, I have heard the likes of Leo Laporte talk about Jungle Disk and Amazon’s S3 service.
I have been looking for a ‘cloud’ back-up solution that was reasonable and viable as a solution. Yes, I know that Apple has the .Mac [now MobileMe] Service for 99$ a year; however, I wanted something a cheaper and easier to use.
You can pick-up Jungle Disk for 20$ and that includes all future updates and upgrades. Once you download and install the software package you need to enter you information. Next, head over to Amazon and the AWS site and sign in with your account information and then register for the S3 services. Once you are registered you will need to collect 2 Access Keys from Amazon. The first is your Access Key and the second is Your Secret Access Key.
With both of these, you can then connect to Amazon’s S3 service. I found it easier to add one directory at a time and let the upload take it’s time. It took 3 nights for me to upload 4 folders, Documents, Sites, Library, and Downloads. I have about 3.3GB of data from my MacBook that I have put on the cloud. It isn’t much, but it is my essential stuff.
Jungle Disk does a smart back-up. You can schedule back-ups to run daily on down to every 5 minutes. I have mine set for 6 hours. If you have application like Mail or Firefox open it will error out on files that appear to be in use by the application. The application stays open and sits in the Dock. It would make sense for a Dashboard widget or a Menu Bar status icon to allow users quick access to the application monitor. Something like Caffeine or Time Machine.
It is worth the cost, which is on Jungle Disk’s main page here.
iron wil
Note: This will work for OS X, Windows, Windows Home Server, and Linux.
