Click here to view the embedded video.

Generally when files sit on my computer, I may have one copy of them. Sometimes I will have a hard drive elsewhere where I keep copies of those files, because as we all know hard drives come and go. This system allows me to keep my data at any point in time (sometimes two) with the ability to lose one of those ‘points’ at any time. I have used different version control systems before and it gives me the great ability to control my data at a variety of fixed points in time per set of files. So I can keep a version control system and make automated back-ups of that. This isn’t terribly practical for data like images, videos of important things in your life, source code, private writings, important songs, the things you don’t ever want to lose, and things that don’t change much. It would be nice to take all of these concepts and just boil it down, right? I think I have found that Holy Grail of data storage.

Using Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 has given me the most awesome combo of personal data backup ever. With my current set-up I have a standard Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Account which attaches to my standard Amazon account I use for ordering books. This gives me access to my “cloud data”.

Amazon distributes this data out all over the web and it is failure proof. The website states:

Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation, and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.

That is a powerful statement, but with cloud technology and RAID storage this service is one of the most powerful data storage system for every purpose. It is marketed towards web developers for use in websites, cloud computing, and high intensity global distribution, but it’s even really awesome just for your laptop backups and it’s dirt cheap!

They price based on a varied scale. It breaks down into a price you have to pay per GB of storage per month and a price you have to pay per GB of storage to access it (read or write). At a glance, the numbers don’t make sense and you can’t even begin to imagine how much it will cost you to use it for backups. But I decided to go for it. Using a piece of software called Jungle Disk I was able to interface with this data as an interesting type of backup media. Jungle Disk allows incremental backups (only changed data) and also offers version control. This way when you don’t make much change to your data, it costs you way less to keep it up to date using Jungle Disk and you can keep a time range of data also. Last month (Sept. ‘09) I paid the following for my Amazon S3 account:

What that really says is that I maintained 22.2 GB of important data (including 6 days worth of file version history for modified and deleted files of all types), 2.6 GB of transfered data that came out of my computer, plus 1.1 GB of data that came out of their cloud, I only spent $4.47. This is also for 2 computers, both of which I use for continuous work. If I didn’t make that many changes to my local set of data it would have only been $3.34 for that month. That’s more than I spend at Taco Bell after a night at the bars. I would much rather have my data safe.

The Jungle Disk software reliably and cheaply synchronizes your local and cloud data over the span of however many days you told it to. Jungle Disk itself only costs $2.00 per month. This is amazing! Not only is my data reliably stored at two places (one of which is indestructible) but it’s protected from me by giving me a set of data over a time frame that I can continue to access. You can even set it to never delete a file if you want. Jungle Disk will also hook you up with a network drive that you can treat basically like a hard drive. This data stays separate from your backup data, but it is charged just the same and is stored in the same cloud “bucket”.

This has been the best backup solution I have seen so far for my personal data and my personal business. Even for enterprise data it’s perfect (all of these transactions can be encrypted of course). Back-ups of this site as well as my other sites also sit on there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Running my Ubuntu laptop alongside my dual monitor work computer with Synergy immediately creates a triple monitor and dual OS system. Besides the inability to drag windows across computers (uhm… think about it, not possible anyways) this software is amazing. It even allows the ability to share your clipboard amongst all the computers and handles window focusing beautifully, as well as many other amazing features. But what can I run it on??

• Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me (the Windows 95 family)
• Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP (the Windows NT family)
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
• Unix
  • X Windows version 11 revision 4 or up
  • XTEST extension
    (use “xdpyinfo | grep XTEST” to check for XTEST)

There you have it. Go try out this piece of wonderful invention!