PawEng

For a long time I have been looking at using online storage to backup my data. My main concerns were the reliability of the company providing the storage, and the privacy of the data. Enter Jungle Disk. It is a small company with the right philosophy: Encrypt the data locally using state-of-the-art encryption techniques, and update the encrypted data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Only encrypted data ever leave my computer, and nobody but I can decrypt them. I trust that Amazon will be around for a while — unlike the many start-up companies that offer online backup.

Jungle Disk is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. For $20 you get a lifetime of upgrades. There are no monthly subscription fees or anything like that. You pay Amazon directly for storage at a rate of $0.15 per GB per month. There are also fees for transfer of data in and out of your Amazon S3 account.

Your $20 Jungle Disk license allows you to install Jungle Disk on multiple computers using the same Amazon S3 account. This is really convenient. You can even mount your Jungle Disk as a drive and use it to share files between your computers. Or if you want, you can use your favorite backup tool to copy files directly to your mounted Jungle Disk drive. Of course, Jungle Disk’s backup tool is fully functional so I see no need to use anything else.

I use Jungle Disk simply for backup. It sits as an icon in the system tray and automatically backs up my data on a set schedule. And every month I get a bill from Amazon — around $6 to keep my 30+ GB of data safe. Not a bad deal, I think.

Visit Jungle Disk for more information.

Update on August 12, 2008: The online storage company TheLinkUp went belly-up, and up to 45% of customer data was lost. Read more about it at Network World. I still trust Amazon with my data, and I am happy I didn’t choose a small company to safe-guard my data.

Tags: Backup, Linux, Mac, Windows