The Road to Leopard: Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk deliver me from the backup wilderness

March 08, 2008

By Adam Turner

Jungle Disk is backup software that connects to Amazon’s online Simple Storage Service (S3). The online service offers unlimited storage capacity on enterprise-grade data centres spread across the US and Europe. Amazon charges a mere 15 US cents per gigabyte for data storage and you only pay for what you use. Amazon also charges 10 US cents per GB of data uploaded and 18 cents per GB downloaded (a premium you’d be more than happy to pay should you ever need to call on it for file recovery). File sizes are limited to 5 GB. There are no sign-up or ongoing charges, meaning you can happily backup multiple computers for only a few dollars a month. Only a few years ago such a service might have cost hundreds of dollars per month. Of course there are also your ISP’s bandwidth charges to allow for, so take care if you’re charged for uploads.

If you’ve already got an Amazon shopping account (and who hasn’t?), it’s simple to create an S3 account using the same billing details. Amazon S3’s service is only  half of the solution because Amazon doesn’t provide the software to access it. You need software designed specifically for S3 - which is where Jungle Disk comes in.

One of Jungle Disk’s key strengths is that the software is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. What’s really impressive is that each version offers the same interface and same full set of features, making life much easier for those of us who swap between operating systems during the day. You can also mount your S3 Jungle Disk storage area and treat it like a local drive. For someone like me who has recently moved to Leopard but is on a quest to break my dependence on any one operating system by using multi-platform apps, Jungle Disk is manna from heaven.

As if this wasn’t good enough, Jungle Disk costs a mere $US20. This one-off license fee allows you to …