All I want for Christmas is Offsite Backup

All I want for Christmas is Offsite Backup …

My wife’s most precious Christmas gift was also the least expensive: the $4 a year we’re paying Amazon to backup two gigabytpes of digitial memories of Christmas past.

Despite the backup CDs, and backup USB drive, she still worried that our digital photos would one day turn up missing. A few days before Christmas, a friend turned me onto Jungle Disk, an Amazon S3 application.

Jungle Disk makes using the Amazon cloud as easy as using a local disk drive. Simply install the client software (for Windows, Mac, or Linux) on your computer, like any other application. Sign up for an Amazon S3 account, and suddenly, you can backup up anything you like to the Amazon cloud.

What’s the cloud? Technically, cloud computing is “An emerging computing paradigm where data and services reside in massively scalable data centers and can be ubiquitously accessed from any connected devices over the internet.” Colloquially, it’s using the web like a computer peripheral.

Raw storage on the Amazon cloud starts at $0.15 a gigabtye a month ($1.80 a year). The rate compares well to applications like Google Picasa. A free Picasa account comes with 1 GB of storage. For $20 a year, Google gives you 10 GB more. If we did need 10 GB of A3 storage, we’d be paying $18 a year. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s Flckr gives .1 GB (100 MB) to free accounts, and offers unlimited storage for $25 a year.

Of course, Jungle Disk and Flckr are very different applications. JD lets you backup or store any kind of file, just like it was a remote network drive. Flckr is restricted to photos, but lets you share those photos with anyone you like (in strange and marvelous ways).

There are two primary ways of using the Jungle Disk Desktop Edition– you can choose to use one or both of these options.

 

• The second option for using Jungle Disk is the automatic backup feature. The Automatic Backup feature allows you to keep files and folders on your local machine backed up automatically off-site to your Jungle Disk. If you mainly want to use your online storage space for backup, the Automatic Backup feature makes it easy and eliminates the need to copy files to your mapped drive manually on a regular basis or use 3rd party backup software. Once backed up with Automatic Backup, your files will also be available via the mapped drive.
   

You can easily open or copy backed up files from your mapped drive back to your local machine. If you need to restore a large number of files to your machine you can also use the built-in Restore feature that allows you to select a large number of files and directories and restore them in a single operation. The restore feature also allows you to restore previous versions of files, which are stored in a special directory on your Jungle Disk.

JD does come with some startup costs. In addition to the storage costs, a small charge applies to every data transfer. Usually, the transfer fee is lost in the rounding, but if you upload several gig, it could add up to folding money. In my case, the first month’s bill from Amazon totaled a whopping thirty-two cents for uploading and storing 1.5 GB. Even better, I setup S3 to use my existing Amazon.com account, leaving me one less login to manage.

The only bump so far is that the Windows backup doesn’t run if the user is logged out. One workaround is to set the backup to try again as soon as it can. Then, the next time that login is used, the backup will launch. If you’re using incremental backup, it won’t be a noticeable performance hit.

Note that there’s a one time $20 charge for the JD client software. But, it’s a double saw buck well spent. Jungle Disk is quick and easy to use. The user interface is clean, and it’s very easy to indicate what files to backup, and how often to refresh the backup.

Welcome to the Jungle!