If you’re like me, you are generally successful at denying the foolish position you put yourself in. You are fully aware that your hard drive could fail at any moment. You know the mayhem and suffering this event would cause. You even know that, as an imperfect product of human manufacture, your hard drive certainly will fail some day. And every time you reflect on this, you feel a dull momentary pain, because you NEVER BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE. Then the moment of guilt passes and your well-honed skills at denial resume their duty. So much to do! You’ll get around to it one of these days.
I need a no-hassle solution to this problem, because I know that I simply can’t trust myself to be responsible. In the past I have gone so far as to buy a backup drive, and then place it, unused, next to my computer, as if some osmotic process might take care of the backup for me. That is why I have been hoping for a dead easy web-based service that would take care of my backup problem for me. Web backup has been available for a few years now, but it hasn’t been cheap. That’s changing now, and the best thing I’ve seen so far is Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a free client that plugs straight into Amazon’s industrial-strength dirt-cheap S3 storage network. I don’t know how they make their money, but they seem like the real thing. Here’s an Amazon marketing piece about them. Anyway, the price has finally reached the point where even I can be induced to be responsible. Here is my bill for January. Admittedly, I was only backing up a few dozen megabytes as a test, but the storage cost me exactly one cent for the month.
Even if Jungle Disk doesn’t work out, there will be other S3-based services that jump in to take up the slack. Here’s a list from Jeremy Zawodny on Amazon S3 Backup Tools.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 