I have long been interested in using Amazon’s S3 service for my backups, but I’ve never found enough time to sort it all out. I’m not saying that hooking into S3 is incredibly complex, but it is complex enough that I always end up giving up and moving on to whatever else is on my plate. JungleDisk is the first front-end application that I’ve found for my Ubuntu box that just plain old worked out of the box.

There are a plethora of sync solutions out there but they all have two basic problems for me. They either don’t run on Linux or they don’t have enough disk space. I have been running my own custom rsync scripts for years against providers like BQBackup and Rsync.net so I know that I need about 120GB to maintain 30 days of backups. On straight Linux machines where I can use hard links, it’s about 80GB, but since none of the sync providers I’ve run across utilize hard links, that’s irrelevant.

Amazon S3 is by far the cheapest solution out there, but you have to have some tech savvy to get it all up and running. Some of that complexity comes from the Amazon-centric language like ‘bucket’ but some of it is good old geek know how. I’ve been looking for an easy to set up front end for S3 for a while now and thanks to Leo Laporte, I have stumbled across JungleDisk.

JungleDisk provides clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux and uses either Rackspace or Amazon clouds to store your backed up data (your choice). After installation, a fairly intuitive install wizard runs and I had my backups setup within minutes. In addition to my backups, I also ended up with an online disk which syncs to a specified folder on my local machine. I am using Dropbox for that and share files between my wife’s laptop and my desktop so I don’t have a lot of use for that at the moment, but it’s nice to have and I am sure I will find some reason to use in the near future.

I ran my first backup of 30 some GB and I was off to the races. I am now in the process of building up 30 days worth of archives using JungleDisk before I shut down my current scripts for good.

One of the great selling points of JungleDisk for me is the encryption. Out of the box, my backups are encrypted using SSL as they are sent to Amazon’s cloud. With a few extra steps, I am also able to encrypt them on the cloud. The notion of leaving my backups unencrypted on the Internet is really unappealing.

Backups are also compressed before leaving my machine and since S3 charges for bytes put-ed and bytes get-ed that helps reduce the cost even farther than S3’s low prices already provide.

I decided on the Workgroup level of account because it lets me set up sub-accounts underneath it. You may just need the Personal level account if you’re just looking to back up one person’s stuff. I created a sub-account for my wife and installed the Windows client onto her Windows laptop. Now we’re all backup up securely to S3 and spending 1/2 the money we were before.

When setting up the encryption, I wasn’t 100% sure that I had it right so I opened a support ticket with JungleDisk. I was pleasantly surprised to get fast and accurate responses back from Travis. I asked a series of questions regarding setup and encryption and Travis answered them all very quickly. I use a TON of web apps and am totally unaccustomed to getting good support so that just made me love JungleDisk all the more.

Once I have a few more days of backups to play with, I will do some test restores to verify things are working as expected. I’ll update this post with my results.

Disclosure: While talking with Travis I mentioned I would be blogging about JungleDisk and I might be getting a free t-shirt for my troubles.

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Tags: Add new tag, Amazon S3, Backup, Dropbox, Jungle Disk, JungleDisk, Leo Laporte, Linux, Windows

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