Has anybody tried this out? JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3 â„¢ - Jungle Disk

It looks like a good and inexpensive option for storage, using the redundant Amazon server system.

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Raymond Victor Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

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This may be more information that you were looking for. I haven't tried JungleDisk but I heard a interview with the owner of JungleDisk that made it sound like a very promising backup solution. The podcast is here: Security Now. I have been using Mozy for my online backups and it works very well with no hassles.

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Steve Kellam
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Redeemer ARP Church (Blacksburg, VA)
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I haven't tried it but I would have no qualms at all using it. Really, what the product is, is a software module that allows you to buy space on the Amazon S3 system. Amazon deployed a massive file system with incredible reliability and redundancy and the interesting thing about it is that the storage is incredibly cheap and bandwidth is actually a bit more expensive than the storage itself.

It's not the typical kind of web accessible kind of storage (i.e. via http and ftp) so folks that use it have had to use the API to be able to use the S3 storage. This puts that redundancy and reliability at a cheap price at your fingertips.

Many companies have significantly reduced their prices by going to the S3 system. Perfect example is Smugmug that pays for terabytes of storage but has figured out a way to integrate the storage of images on S3 with the display of the images on web pages. Instead of paying for rack space, backup, etc at a massive data center they pay for what they use rather than having to pay for capacity to come. It's not super fast like having your own dedicated server but paying for exactly what you use is very nice.

If I didn't pay for a dedicated server and have some other options for keeping my data backed up online I would probably use this. I think this is but one of many products that you're going to see get developed as vendors figure out ways to make bandwidth and storage more readily available on a "use it as you need it" basis.

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Rich
PCA, Northern VA
Student, New Geneva Theological Seminary

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Thanks, all. My laptop is always backed up at work with redundant servers, but this looks like a great option for backing up all those photos and personal files I have on various machines at home. I think it is more cost effective than an external hard drive, but I'll look at that as well.

Sort of a side-note, I just took five of my old PCs to the local PC graveyard (a recycling used-computer company). I had to pay to get rid of them. While I was there I wandered around the remnants of technology from over the past 20 years or so.

What a tremendous amount of ephemeral gadgets we've burned though in so short a time! I saw cutting edge devices that are now as obsolete as buggy whips. Zip drives, 28k modems, all-in-one word processesors, 8086 motherboards. So much money, enthusiasm, time, effort in learning systems, all sitting in the "as-is" bin for $0.80 and up. As a former electronics geek, it was exciting to see all that stuff, but as a consumer of much it, it was a bit sobering.

I'm less likely to buy gadgets these days and more inclined to take advantage of the infrastructure that's developed. On-line storage and on-line apps seem like the way to get out of the gadget race and let the big guys work out the kinks.

Zip drives are not wholly obsolete! Still available for purchase at Iomega Data Backup: Data Storage Devices: Removable Storage: Managed Services!

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Of course, they're not wholly obsolete. And there's still a small market for buggy whips too!

I think zips go up to 750 megabytes while DVDs go up to 4.7 gigs. Around here, even floppies are more popular than zips. (I've got a zip drive somewhere in a drawer, along with the disks. But I can't get it to work anymore.)