I am very meticulous about the way I back up my data. I run daily diff backups, followed by weekly complete backups of the 200gb or so of data I consider absolutely critical (i.e., e-mail, pictures, World of Warcraft combat logs, etc.) I then bun that data to writable DVDs which I then neatly file in my basement, with a couple of copies kept at various locations other than my house in case of a catastrophic.
Still, I’d like even more redundancy and have recently been playing around with the Jungle Disk betas.
Jungle Disk is software for backing up important data online. It is a front-end program for Amazon’s S3 online storage service.
There are a couple of advantages that Jungle Disk has over other online backup systems.
The first is that it is very cheap. Amazon S3 charges just 20 cents per gigabyte to upload and then just 15 cents per gigabyte per month for storage. So if I upload my 200gb of data this month, it will cost me $40 for the bandwidth to transfer it and $30 to store it. Assuming I don’t make any changes, it will only cost me $30 per month to store the 200gb. If my hard drive crashed and I needed to download everything, again I’d be looking at $40 to transfer it all back to my computer.
The second thing is that, while others have noted, Amazon pretty much makes no promises about availability in order to limit its liability, data on S3 is stored across multiple servers at multiple locations. Nothing is certain, but I’m betting Amazon S3’s reliability is significantly better than what I can achieve with my Zip backups burned to DVD.
Also, the Jungle Disk application promises to have a lot of key features necessary to make an online backup application useful, such as preserving modification and other file data on S3 to make syncing data from the local drive to the online system viable.
The latest beta also adds an option to encrypt files with 256 bit AES as they are uploaded. For me, encryption is the single most important element to any online backup system — if I can’t be reasonably certain that my files are going to be safe from prying eyes in the event a server is compromised, count me out. 256 bit AES combined with a strong password more than satisfies my concerns.
So what, if any, downsides does something like Jungle Disk have. Hmm..ever try to upload 200gb worth of data over even a fast cable connection? Even at consistent 100kbs upload speeds, I’d be looking at roughly 555 hours to upload it all. Ugh. Once Jungle Disk is out of beta and has had a few months for the more security conscious to critique it, I’ll probably upload my data through the high speed connection at the university I attend rather than spend months doing so through the cable connection I’ve got.