I stumbled upon a great example of the Snow Leopard Services that I've been drooling over. The S3 Upload Service by August Lilleaas is available as a workflow which can be opened in Automator, so you can examine its inner workings. It uses AppleScript and Ruby, easily passed back and forth thanks to Automator's building-block-style workflow. It lets you upload a publicly-accessible file to an S3 bucket, and copies the URL into your clipboard upon successful upload.

The workflow requires that you at least have RubyGems installed, and have an Amazon S3 account set up, but it will handle the rest. It asks for your S3 credentials with an AppleScript popup, which has the unfortunate side effect of not being able to be forced to the front very easily and tends to get lost behind other windows. There are workarounds to that, but no way to keep it on top once it's up. It looks possible to build custom nibs for your services, so I might play around with making a general-purpose utility panel popup to fill the void in my own projects.

In the process of rolling my own Services in Snow Leopard, I've definitely found some limitations, but I'm having fun working around them. This one is a great example of passing results -- returned from different languages -- and processing them, all within Automator. It's not super-polished -- your mileage may vary -- but a big thanks to August for putting it out there for the rest of us to play with!

Apple did the world a great service when they introduced Time Machine backups to OS X. Suddenly, anyone could attach an external disk drive to their Mac and have a constant set of backups at their fingertips with little or no intervention required.

However, there was one very big, hairy fly floating in the soup of backup contentment -- if your backup drive was destroyed or stolen, your backup was gone. Many of us who are paranoid about backups started doing a second level of backups to offsite services such as Mozy, Carbonite, or my personal favorite, BackBlaze.

There's a new kid on the block with a different approach to offsite backup -- Time Warp. This US$25 Mac application (free during the beta period) takes your Time Machine backups, compresses and encrypts them with 256-bit AES encryption, and then uploads them to your personal Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) account.

How does the cost of storage on Amazon S3 compare with the other services? The current costs are $0.15 per GB per month for storage, $0.10 per GB to backup data into S3, and $0.17 per GB to restore data from S3. The Jumping Bean Software team says that backup up 20 GB of personal data would cost about $1.50 per month, which is in line with costs for the other services. Time Warp does intelligent filtering to keep "dumb files" like cache, trash, and temporary files from being uploaded and costing you money.

If you take a glance at the sample screenshot at the top of this post, you'll notice that Time Warp does its best to give you a handle on your storage costs, so there's no guesswork involved. Leopard users who have been on the fence about whether or not to invest in an offsite backup solution might want to take advantage of the Time Warp beta.

Time Machine made it easy for Leopard owners to back up their Macs on local external hard drives, and lately we've seen a number of online backup services such as Carbonite, BackBlaze, and MozyPro debut for the Mac platform. These online services are great (I personally use BackBlaze), but there's a monthly cost associated with them. What if you already have access to a large volume of server space?

App4Mac has just announced Twin 1.0 for Mac OS X (US$39.67, €29.00), an online backup solution that works with all sorts of servers: FTP (all varieties), WebDAV, Amazon S3, and even MobileMe. Unlike many of the other online solutions, Twin claims that it retains all the Mac OS X file metadata, ACLs, and privileges, and your data is kept safe with AES-256 "Jack Bauer quality" encryption. In addition to the online backups, you can use Twin for backing up your files to local drives and have the backups begin when the external drive it plugged in.

I'm impressed with the powerful scheduling capabilities of Twin, which include a way to use logical operators to determine exactly when backups should proceed or not. Having an offsite backup is that extra bit of security that every Mac user should have. Check out the gallery below for some screenshots of the app in action. You can also download a free, limited-capability trial of Twin if you're interested in kicking the tires.

I had to do some extensive testing before I got too excited, but after a conversation with the developers I'm pleased to announce that ExpanDrive 2.0 is out. We've mentioned it before, but to recap: ExpanDrive allows you to mount remote servers as drives directly accessible in Finder. With a completely rewritten (again) SFTP layer, the existing FTP support and new Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) support, it's even more useful than the last time we mentioned it. One of the developers, Jeff Mancuso, mentioned to me back at the last WWDC that the S3 support was in the works; it's great to see it come to fruition.

In my testing, I found that a previously-existing S3 option, JungleDisk, can cause conflicts with ExpanDrive's S3 support. JungleDisk users should note that there are some issues, but they seem to clear up if you create vanilla buckets in your account and use those with ExpanDrive. I personally found that I was willing to give up JungleDisk entirely at this point, preferring this direct-mount with all of the perks, including a contextual menu in Finder for quickly setting public read/write permissions.

I can attest to the fact that it's faster, and that the S3 support is working (wonderfully, without JungleDisk). ExpanDrive 2.0 is a $39.95 purchase (well worth it if you deal with remote UNIX systems or S3), and a $19.95 upgrade for existing users. There's a free trial available.

Interarchy 9, Nolobe's FTP application, is out Friday 1/11 with over 100 new features. We've covered Interarchy in the past, in part because of its old-school cred, but this release has some new-school polish.

In addition to the existing support for the usual protocols and Amazon S3 transfers, version 9 adds a new protocol built on SSH that offers security, speed and flexibility beyond the limitations of SFTP. The protocol is perl-based and should work with any server running perl v4 or later. I'm also happy to see the addition of a Finder-style path bar which accepts dropped files on any part of the path. Some other highlights from the extensive release notes include:

• Major upgrades to tab functionality
  
• A multi-function sidebar for easy access to, well, everything
  
• "Copy Public URL"
• "Preview in Safari" support added
  
• Path Finder support
  
• Sparkle updates

Interarchy 9 will retail at $59, but is available at a $39 introductory price until March 1st. Even with the discount, it still comes in higher than most of its commercial competitors. There is a fully functioning demo you can use to test it against your current solution and see if the hype stacks up to the price.

Of course, if Interarchy is your current solution, upgrades are $29 and free for anyone who purchased Interarchy on or after February 1st, 2007.