In this edition of Living in the Clouds
Series, I am going to talk about two apps, one web app and a desktop app.
The combination of these two apps is a very potent tool for anyone wanting to
backup their data on the Clouds. Amazon
S3 is the cloud based storage offered by Amazon Web Services. It is a highly
scalable, reliable, decentralized, fault tolerant storage built inside Amazon
clouds. At the cost of 15 cents per GB storage, 10 cents per GB inbound
bandwidth and 17 cents per GB outbound bandwidth, this is a cheaper way in which
one can protect their valuable data. Amazon has recently added datacenters in
Europe to help add more geographical diversity for those who want such a
protection.
Jungledisk is a desktop application that helps you backup your data
automatically and also mount Amazon S3 buckets as a network drive. This app
makes the entire cloud based storage experience seamless. You can learn more
about how to use Jungledisk to setup backup with Amazon S3 in this article.
As it is customary in this series, I am adding a video that will help anyone
setup their Amazon S3 account. The video uses a firefox extension to access S3.
Even though it is also very powerful, I strongly recommend Jungledisk to make
the experience seamless.
As I usually do in this series, I am listing out the Pros and Cons that are
important from my point of view.
Pros:
Highly scalable and reliable storage. Virtually no limits on the amount of
storage and no restrictions on the type of files stored.
Extremely cost effective. With Jungledisk, one can setup incremental backup
and it makes bandwidth charges extremely low. Users pay only for the storage
they use without any fixed fees. Plus, Jungledisk can be installed in many
computers and use the same S3 bucket unlike some of the other services like
Mozy.
Jungledisk allows users to mount S3 buckets as network drives. We can then
use our favorite programs like rsync to sync the local drive with S3 bucket.
Great encryption offering a high level of security.
Jungledisk is available for Windows, Mac and Linux making the storage
experience truly seamless.
Jungledisk works as both a backup tool and an archive tool. If you want to
backup some huge file on Amazon S3 and delete from local hard disk, it is
possible with Jungledisk.
Cons:
Jungledisk has been acquired by Rackspace. They have promised continued
support for Amazon S3 but there is no guarantee that it will continue forever.
Great post Krishnan - I too use the combination of S3 and Jungledisk to back up our main server in the office. It is by far the cheapest option to store gigabytes of data offsite.
We have Jungledisk installed on all our workstations/laptops as well so that we can pull any of our data off the cloud no matter where we are.
I am still to decide whether to go for their 'pro' edition which allows incremental backups of large file (Our Exchange dump is around 10Gb!).
It will be interesting to see where Rackspace takes this service in the future - I hope they don't tie into another pricier storage provider!
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