Admittedly, it was an easy sell since I’ve been using Amazon’s S3 service on the job for the last 8 months for storing db backups so I’m familiar with the pros, cons, and costs and I had looked at Jungle Disk as a possible solution but disregarded it since it did not support Linux. Mike posted his thoughts about it and pointed out that they are giving some love to The Penguin.
After a quick spin on the free trial client I went ahead and signed up for the Plus service which allows you to browse your files online. Yes, you could use the S3 Firefox plugin but given the way that Jungle Disk writes folders as files it makes for some ugly viewing and the same goes for the S3Sync tools. Anyways, I look at the $12/year as a donation to keep the company afloat and developing.
To give people an idea of the cost I’m going to start with backing up my photos (33GB) and the last three years of eMusic (50GB) which the first transfer cost will be about $30 dollars and after that will cost about $12.50 a month. This data grows at about 2GB a month which will tack on less than a dollar extra a month. Not too bad of a proposition though I do see the potential for climbing up to around $35/month though the cost is worth the piece of mind it brings.
I’m a fan of Bucket Explorer because its folder structure is compatible with S3Fox and wordpress-s3. I know it’s more along the lines of an ftp client and overkill for what you’re doing, but *long ago when I tried it* I couldn’t handle Jungle Disk being incompatible with pretty much every other S3 tool out there.
Yeah, I gave Bucket Explorer a whirl while trying to help a co-worker access our S3 account. Solid as an ftp style client but what sold me on Jungle Disk was the notion of rsync style backups + fuse without me having to really do much beyond symlink junglediskmonitor to /usr/bin/ and make a pretty icon for AWN. I suppose if/when the company folds then I’ll be up the creek with my backups…
Maybe I’m not following you but if Jungle Disk goes out of business, the software will continue to work and your data should still be there, no? But maybe you meant something else…
Well, I can still get at my files but they are just in a miserably fugged-out format…which is what I had meant in my impenetrable inarticulateness.
You guys might want to check out this blog post…looks like version 2 will offer some more “standard” S3 options for you:
http://blog.jungledisk.com/2008/02/19/buckets-buckets-everywhere/
That will be neat to see how they re-implement their backup system to make it at once usable by other tools but avoid the bucket constraints of S3. But overall, I’m very happy with the product as a means to backup my data and nothing is stopping me from leveraging the tools I use on the job to store media for this blog or to share.
Ha! They got me. I use S3 to host content for a WordPress based DAM (which is why I need compatibility with the aforementioned tools) and would love to take advantage of Jungle Disk’s simplicity for the occasional administrative task.