It’s been about a year since I wrote about my backup solution, which I’ve finally outgrown. Backing up to my iPod was nice: it was free, encrypted, and gave me some sense of having an off-site backup in addition to having three computers at home regularly triplicating data. Alas, even my meager 8 GB of photos, 4 GB of documents, and 8 GB of actual music is now enough to fill my aging iPod.
It’d be a great excuse to buy a new one, but Amazon has now set it’s sights on commoditizing online storage and web services as it did for retail sales. Based on a pay-per-usage model with the depth of Amazon’s datacenters, it’s appealing for startups and personal backups alike.
JungleDisk offers a backup front end for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Their last example of 20 GB stored and 2 GB transferred per month is close to my needs, and tough to beat with any other solution at $20 for the software and $3.40 per month. Of course, a backup is only as good as it’s encryption; 256-bit AES matches my current TrueCrypt solution.
Setting up JungleDisk is simple enough; there are ample links within the program to sign-up for Amazon S3 and get your secret key. One thing to be careful of in copying the ID and key from Amazon’s page is that you need to trim leading and trailing spaces after pasting. Also, encryption is on another tab. It also has automatic backups, though with a MacBook that likes to nap, the times may need some tweaking and an occasional manual kick.
While experimenting with that, I’ve also found a few more tricks to stretch iPod storage space: ignore a few big directories of photo outtakes and the myriad files Subversion sprinkles in it’s working directories.
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