Following some links last week I ended up on jungledisk.com. All of 30 secs later I had the client downloaded and started backing up my hard drive.

What is it ? It’s a collection of clients for the 3 majors (Windows, OS X, Linux) that essentially mount up an S3 storage bucket as a separate volume. You purchase the jungledisk client for $20 after a trial period, then get an S3 account with Amazon.com and settle your bill with them, based on exactly how much transfer and disk space you use. Set the whole lot up, and bingo you have an online volume, that (one would hope) is near infallible.

Over the past week I’ve had a mac connected up, and an xp box, to the same S3 account. I’m in the process of slowly backing up all of my very precious photos etc. You do need a fat pipe to go and store all this stuff online but that comes with the territory. The beauty of this system is it appears just as another volume, and with cross platform clients, it means you can have your data storage off in some other place, without worrying about it.

The cost.. well, hardly anything to get worked up around. So far I’ve spent a princely sum this month of $0.16USD with Amazon for ~1gb transfer, and 300mb storage.

I’m stoked. No iffy external hard drives, or optical media to get damaged. Of anyone I expect Amazon to be the most reliable service, much more than anyone could acheive with a SOHO RAID storage device, for a fraction of the cost.

Very tidy solution, and well worth a look at.