Jungle Disk lets you securely store files on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) servers. It runs on your local machine as a WebDAV server, allowing you to access S3 as a remote disk. Today the always wonderful Bruce Stewart blogged about an online post he'd stumbled across which put across the question of whether this would be a good way to take your iTunes library on the road.
Matt Thommes wrote that he was looking for a solution that eliminated worries about capacity (there's no upper limit on S3 storage), allow world-wide access to his music (he could connect anywhere there was Internet), and allow him to use play the music directly from iTunes. Since Jungle Disk allows you to use S3 as a remote disk, it was just a matter of dropping his iTunes library onto S3, allowing the data to transfer and then setting his new iTunes Music folder location.
Keep in mind that S3 is reasonably priced, but certainly not cheap. It costs $0.15 per month per gigabyte and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transfer. When your library starts running upwards of 30 GB, you need to do some practical math. As a rule, S3/Jungle Disk is great for backup, okay for being on the road, but not so good for day-to-day use on your main computer because you're paying for that transfer. Do keep in mind, though, that Jungle Disk does some caching. On the other hand, if you're bringing a laptop with you, odds are that you can just store your data right on the laptop and use S3 as an emergency backup.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-27-2007 @ 1:18PM
Sam Cole said...
mp3tunes.com does all of this.
syncing your music up.
listening to it on their website.
and they even have a program that makes your music into a shared library.
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1-27-2007 @ 1:26PM
J.J. said...
Erica, I followed your link to the O'Reilly article you wrote. I'm confused though.... what is the difference between the Jungle Disk and the S3 Browser that you mention ?
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1-28-2007 @ 12:05AM
Cowicide said...
Hmmm... how about COMPLETELY free and you don't have to upload anything.... at all? Run Abyss Web Server on your Mac or if you know how, run the Apache Web Server built into your Mac and password protect it with the .htaccess file, terminal, etc. It's so silly to pay someone for access to your tunes on your computer when it's already free.
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1-28-2007 @ 12:18AM
rd said...
How in the world are you supposed to upload your entire 30+GB music library over the web? With a DSL connection it would take forever. The upstream rate is only about 100Kbit/s (not byte/s). Seems impractical.
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1-28-2007 @ 5:43AM
Jeniffer said...
There is an excellent website for online backup information, news and articles. Check it out here:
http://www.BackupReview.info
This site lists more than 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.
Cheers,
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2-03-2007 @ 12:38PM
kiltbear said...
Actually 30GB ain't all that bad... Since I use macosx, I use rsync to backup everything that is under my user home directory to my website colo. This is about 80GB. When someone had mentioned this idea before, I shopped around and found that at the time dreamhost offered web hosting and 400GB of storage for $15 per month. It took about 2 months of running all night long for all the data to get backed up. But that is the joy of rsync, it just picks up where it left off. What is also nice is that I just let the archive grow, even thought I delete things off my local machine, they are left on the server.
The difficult problem will be if I truly want to restore everything quick, but that is why I also rsync my laptop to my desktop. The copy on the net is for a catastrophic loss scenario, or if by some chance I want a copy of particular song.
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