I've been using a program called Jungle Disk for a couple of years now as part of my backup solution and wanted to let the group know about my experience. They just recently did a major update to the software and I would highly recommend taking a look at it.
Jungle Disk is not a storage service - it provides software that acts as a front-end to a storage service, in this case Amazon's S3 or Rackspace's Cloud. I have been using S3, so I will focus on that from here on. You create an account with S3 which allows you to store data in Amazon's cloud for a few cents per GB per month (and pretty minimal transfer fees). Details are here: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ The Jungle Disk software is then installed on your machine and acts as the medium by which data is transferred to and from your Amazon S3 account. The home use Jungle Disk software provides three basic features. The first is the ability to backup any or all of your computer's files automatically to the S3 drive. This provides for an off-site backup and the configuration options are impressive, including complete control over the number of previous copies of files to keep and for how long. You can have as many computers backing up to the system as you want, each gets its own vault. The second is the ability to have a network drive which can be mapped to multiple computers. This allows for fles to be kept on the drive and shared with many different computers, very similar to a LAN share drive common in the workplace. You can also specify the size of local cache for this drive to speed up transfers and minimize network traffic. The third, and newest, feature is multi-way sync. You can take any folder on your drive and sync it to S3 and any number of other machines. Any changes made online or offline to the folder and its contents will be synced across all the machines automatically. This is something that I have been using Microsoft Live Mesh for over the last year or so but am currently in the process of switching to Jungle Disk for all of the folder syncing I do. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that Live Mesh only allows 5 GB of files to be synced to their cloud, You can use the Live Mesh software to sync more, but it's only peer-to-peer between your Mesh clients and not also synced to the cloud. The second is a big one. With Jungle Disk, you can set it up so that all the encryption/decryption happens on the client side. All S3 is storing for me is random noise. There is no way anyone at Jungle Disk, Amazon, or anywhere else can get access to my data without getting my personal encryption key from my personal machine. I bought Jungle Disk when it first came out and it was $30. At the time I also paid an extra $2/month for an extra service which would use Jungle Disk servers to speed up the upload/download from S3 and allow for resuming of partial file transfers. It looks like with their latest update that they have moved to a monthly fee completely of $3/month (plus whatever your S3 storage fees are). I think this is pretty fair given my experience so far. --------------------------- Brian Weeden Technical Advisor Secure World Foundation <http://www.secureworldfoundation.org> +1 (514) 466-2756 Canada +1 (202) 683-8534 US
