Backups: Amazon S3 + Jungle Disk = Awesomeness

As a follow-up to my earlier post, Why You Should Avoid Mozy Backups, I wanted to blog about the backup solution that I am using now and absolutely love. I’ve had several people ask what I am currently using for a backup solution after the Mozy debacle, so I thought this would be the easiest way to share the information.

Amazon S3 + Jungle Disk = awesomeness.

After my drive reformat last month (thus the need for my Mozy backup), I had a complete hard drive failure (expected, since I knew a reformat wouldn’t “solve” the issue with the physical drive). I restored all of my data from Amazon S3 using Jungle Disk quickly and easily.

Amazon S3 is a really fast, stable, and inexpensive storage solution. I’ve been using it for more than a month and have spent less than $5 so far. The catch is that Amazon S3 can only be accessed via web services; there is no direct consumer interface. So for those of you with mad coding skills and some spare time, you could probably swing it without Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk provides a simple interface to Amazon S3 along with the ability to do automatic backups at various time intervals. This is a really simple interface – it simply backs up your current data, but does not provide incremental backups, which means that you can only retrieve the most recent copy of a file and not previous versions. After a short free trial, you can buy the software for $20.

Most of my data (maybe 95%) is stored in Clearspace, Zimbra, svn, various online apps, etc., so the number of files backed up is pretty small. An online backup solution like Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk is perfect for me.

Related post: