You need JungleDisk.

Do you have data on your computer that would cripple you if you lost it? Is that data stored anywhere else that is not at the same physical location as you? If a fire took out everything, would you be devastated?

You need JungleDisk.

Have a manual back system that you only remember to do once a month? Do you burn through CDs or DVDs for your backup at an alarming rate?

You need JungleDisk.

Have important backup files on a remote server completely unencrypted? Not sure how safe your host is where you store backups? Use Gmail as a backup strategy?

You, my friend, need JungleDisk.

It takes a while to setup, I won't lie. But it's so worth it that it's ridiculous. Once you have this set up and see it working, working for less than $0.25 a month, you will sleep better and feel better about your data, knowing that it's safe. Just do these steps, right now:

1. Get a AWS account at Amazon. You can usually tack this right onto your existing Amazon account.
2. Get your Amazon AWS access key.
3. Download JungleDisk and install it.
4. Run the JungleDisk Monitor and enter your Amazon information. Don't worry about registering yet. Once you see how useful this is, that will be a no brainer.
5. Go to the Automatic Backup tab. Tell it to backup once a day at whatever time you are usually on your computer.
6. Add a couple of directories that you know you have stuff that you need and, if lost, you would jump out a window.
7. Finally, go to the Encryption tab and add a Custom Key. Usually your files would be encrypted with the Amazon key, but if anyone ever hacks your account, Amazon knows that key and they would be able to look at your files. With a Custom Key, even if someone hacks your account and gets your data and your Amazon key, they wouldn't be able to decrypt your data. You'll want to store this wherever you store your passwords (and it shouldn't be a post it note on your monitor).

That's it. Now run a backup and laugh knowing that not even a fire can stop you now.

I have my and Amy's laptop being updated once a day. If you're going to do more than one computer, you'll also want to set each to use a different "bucket", under the S3 account settings.

Last month, this cost me about $0.35 for 300MB of data in ~2000 files and both of us backing up once a day for about 13 days. I expect this month to cost about $0.16 since JungleDisk only sends changed files to the server. Totally worth it in my opinion. I don't allow it to back up video files or we'd be looking at about 200GB of data and a much different bill every month.

I have my email backed up, my svn repository, documents, Amy's genealogy, code (lots of code), pictures, etc. And I don't worry about it like I used to. Every once in a while I'll go in and add a directory or a couple files, but mostly I'm organized enough with my folders not to have to do that.

If you get more advanced later, you can set up your own back up scheme with rsync or what not because JungleDisk also maps a drive to your S3 account. This lets you be in control if you so wish, although JungleDisk is optimized to keep your S3 costs down by not making needless calls to the server.

And I feel safer. I implore you to go and do this right now. If you want piece of mind about your data, take the 15 minutes and set this up.

And then thank me. Profusely.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 9:35 am by Joe and is filed under General, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.