DanLin.net

Ever since Amazon launched it Web Services products people have been raving about its power and flexibility as well as reasonable pricing. But it is not until now has it been easy and practical enough to use for individuals thanks to services like JungleDisk.

Here is the description of their service from their own Website:

* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux
* Automatically back up your important files quickly and easily

A friend of mine turned me on to the service last week and I have been playing around with it for a couple of days. So far it has worked very well but it is certainly in beta status. It is essentially a front-end for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) that makes the storage-in-a-cloud concept as transparent as possible. It literally looks like a local hard drive when it is connected. Locally cached files makes the file appear instantly on the drive while it works in the background to push it all up to Amazon’s servers without you sitting and waiting as in other services. Even if the computer crashes the service is smart enough to resume the upload when it reboots.

Where it shows as a beta product is in the feature set. Currently there is no easy way to map multiple drives using the same or different accounts. There are no privileges you can set for others to have limited access to your files or even make some of your files live on the internet via regular HTTP. Supposedly all of that will come in time at a fair price of a dollar a month or $20 a lifetime. Of course you will incur Amazon S3 charges for the storage and transfer fees but Jungle Disk isn’t seeing any of that.

Amazon S3 Pricing Structure

A typical scenario where this is extremely useful would be for someone who has a home computer as well as a work PC. You can map your Jungle Disk to both machines regardless where they are in the Internet. Files will appear in both locations just like magic. Or if you have a company with virtual employees across the world you can simply enable access to a Jungle Disk and suddenly everyone will be sharing and working on a network drive as if you are in the same network.

As a backup service it is not the cheapest around. Personally I will need close a terabyte of storage to backup my digital life and Amazon S3 will cost me around $150 a month whereas Mozy offers an unlimited backup service at $4.95/month. Where services like Mozy lacks is the transparency of file access.

I’ve been using it for just a couple of days and have been very impressed with the app. To access multiple Amazon accounts and S3 buckets I’ve even written a little script that allows me to ‘one-click’ swap between them. Let’s just hope Amazon hasn’t patented that as well…