You believe you are diligent about backing up your files – perhaps you regularly back them up to a CD, DVD or one more more external drives. But have you thought about what would happen in the event of a fire or burglary? Your critical files or irreplaceable files could be gone in an instant.
While backing up your data to easily accessible external drives certainly should be part of your backup routine, you may also wish to consider backing up your files offsite. One powerful and inexpensive backup solution that I have found is Jungle Disk which allows you to inexpensively backup your data to Amazon’s S3 online storage Web service.
Using WebDAV technology, JungleDisk allows you to mount a drive on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems from where you can copy, backup and restore your files. You can set JungleDisk to perform automatic backups as well as use your JungleDisk drive just as you would an external drive, by dragging and dropping your files to the drive. And not to worry about security – all of your files are encrypted by a key that you yourself set.
Okay, so I suppose your wondering how much it costs to store your files on Amazon’s S3 service? As of the writing of this article, it costs 15-cents per gigabyte of storage and 18-cents per gigabyte transferred. So 20 gigabytes of storage would cost $3.00 a month. Plus if you add in, say 2 gigabytes of transfer per month, your monthly total would be $3.60. Not bad, hey?
From our experience, the service has been reliable, relatively fast and easy to use. The setup is straight-forward which consists of the following steps:
- Download the Jungle Disk application from their Web site.
- Set up an Amazon S3 account – the Account Settings tab of the Jungle Disk Preferences screen will step you through the process if you don’t already have one.
- Once you set up your Amazon S3 account, you will be given an access key and a secret code which you will need to enter in the Account Settings tab of Jungle Disk’s preferences screen.
- Turn on encryption from the Encryption tab and enter the encryption code you want to use.
- Enter any other additional options in the Automatic backup tab and the Jungle Disk Options tab.
We will be looking at additional offsite backup services in future articles. Are you currently using Jungle Disk? Another offsite backup solution? We’d love to hear about it!
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