Jungle Disk - 3.0b1

I find it ethically gray to charge people to be beta testers. Either call this a final product or a beta and charge or offer free to beta testers accordingly.

If you don't have terrabytes of data, and you have good upload bandwidth, then at .15 per gig for multiple, safe-room offsite storage, then Jungle Disk is certainly up there as one of the top solutions. I've been using it for over a year. The software is easy if inelegant, Amazon's customer service is very good, and I've had not one technical problem.

Having two tbyte drives in different places seems like a decent alternative. That said, it's not infallible compared to multiple redundancies in multiple safe storage sites. Why? I've been using Mac's since the first one rolled out and mass storage was a 20 megabyte scsi drive the size and heft of the American Heritage Dictionary. Since owning generations of different drives made by different manufacturers, I've found that they fail more often than the average rate of 15% within three years. Even worse, at least twice in my life, flood and fire have destroyed my equipment. If it weren't for offsite storage of my most precious photos and files, I'd be offsite in some safe room--in a straight jacket.

So to the good soul who asked why not use Apple free solutions, I do use them. And I use Jungle disk for the above reasons.

Cheers.
Evan Mitchell Stark Phd

I don't understand. Mac solutions - Apple's Backup/Mac.com/Time Machine ALL do the same thing free or the cost of a hard drive. Why pay Amazon $37 a month for 250 gigs of storage when hard drives are so cheap now and Apple has free software solutions? Even a purchase of their TimeCapsule Airport with a Gig of Wireless Storage built in - would pay for itself within the first year? Help me understand why this would be better than Mac.com?

Let me be the first to review then. I've been keeping an eye on S3 and wished there was a simple service that allowed me to use it for back-up purposes. I had seen one related to iTunes but not using regular files/documents. Well, this is the answer. I haven't tried the automated back-up option but simply being able to drag files/folders to a mounted volume is awesome. My upload speeds are 500-650 kbps which is great. I'm not using it to back-up all my project folders but just ones that I need access to from multiple locations. The pricing for S3 makes this ridiculously inexpensive. Try it.