{"id":240,"date":"2008-03-09T01:07:46","date_gmt":"2008-03-09T01:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=240"},"modified":"2008-03-19T20:25:19","modified_gmt":"2008-03-19T20:25:19","slug":"jungle-disk-online-backup-using-amazon-s3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=240","title":{"rendered":"Jungle Disk &#8211; online backup using Amazon S3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jungledisk.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Jungle Disk<\/a> in a few <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/dalelane\">tweets<\/a> before, but now I&#8217;ve got my first few bills from them, I thought I&#8217;d write a longer post about what they&#8217;re like. <\/p>\n<p>For the uninitiated, Jungle Disk is an application that lets you use <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/s3\">Amazon&#8217;s S3 storage<\/a> as an online file store and backup service. You can set the app up to point at a directory of your hard-drive and forget about it &#8211; letting the client backup your files in the background. And you can get the client for Windows, Mac and Linux.<\/p>\n<p>I started using it last December for digital photos. I had over 20 gigs of photos and video clips &#8211; photos from Uni, photos of my daughter&#8217;s first few years, photos from my wedding&#8230; and tons more.<\/p>\n<p>And I wanted to put them somewhere safe.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->There are <strong>alternative options<\/strong>, but none of them appealed:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Backing up to DVDs was an option, but DVD burning is still new enough that I don&#8217;t completely trust that they will last. I have piles of CDs that I burned while at Uni and none of them are readable any more. For DVDs to be a good long-term backup medium, you&#8217;ve got to trust them. And I don&#8217;t.\n<\/li>\n<li>Backing up to USB hard-drives was an option, but I&#8217;ve read that the failure rates on USB hard-drives over time is fairly high (Jungle Disk point at figures like a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usenix.org\/events\/fast07\/tech\/schroeder\/schroeder_html\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">15% failure rate over 5 years<\/a>) &#8211; so again, not sure that I trust it for that.\n<\/li>\n<li>Backing up to network-attached storage was an option &#8211; and one we nearly went with. But it&#8217;s still on-site. And at the risk of sounding a little morbid, if my house was to burn to the ground, my photos would be lost. Most things are insured and\/or replaceable, but my photos aren&#8217;t.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And we&#8217;re entering the age of cloud computing, right? So where better to use as a backup store? I can store my photos on Amazon&#8217;s servers, and let them worry about how to store them safely. <\/p>\n<p>So what does it <strong>cost<\/strong>?<\/p>\n<p>That was another factor &#8211; Amazon S3 compares well to the costs of buying your own USB or network-attached hard-drives if you were to replace your drives every two or three years to reduce risk of drive failure. <\/p>\n<p>You pay a one-off fee to Jungle Disk of $20, then <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/browse.html?node=16427271&#038;no=16427261\">ongoing costs to Amazon of<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$0.15 per gigabyte-month of storage used\n<\/li>\n<li>$0.10 per gigabyte of data uploaded\n<\/li>\n<li>$0.18 per gigabyte of data downloaded\n<\/li>\n<li>$0.01 per 1,000 upload requests\n<\/li>\n<li>$0.01 per 10,000 download requests\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As abstract figures they look pretty good, but until you&#8217;ve tried it you don&#8217;t really know how it will translate into real-life costs. (E.g. how efficient is their backup client in terms of the number of directory listing requests it makes when deciding what needs to be backed up)<\/p>\n<p>This is how their charges translated into actual costs for me. Note that all charges quoted are in US dollars.<\/p>\n<p><strong>December 2007<\/strong><br \/>\nI signed up with Jungle Disk in the last few days of December &#8211; after Christmas in the runup to New Year. So this bit hardly counts &#8211; I&#8217;d only uploaded a few gigs of photos by the end of December.<\/p>\n<p>It was a little surprising to get my first bill a few days after signing up, but this was just a fluke of timing. Bills all come at the start of each month for the previous month&#8217;s usage.<\/p>\n<table width=\"100%\" style=\"background-color: #eeeeee\">\n<tr>\n<td>$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used<\/td>\n<td>0.146 GB-Mo<\/td>\n<td>0.02<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.10 per GB &#8211; all data transfer in<\/td>\n<td>3.262 GB<\/td>\n<td>0.33<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.18 per GB &#8211; data transfer out <\/td>\n<td>0.009 GB<\/td>\n<td>0.01<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests<\/td>\n<td>25293 Requests <\/td>\n<td>0.25<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.01 per 10,000 GET requests <\/td>\n<td>15617 Requests <\/td>\n<td>0.02<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Total<\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> 0.63<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>tax<\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> 0.10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><strong>TOTAL<\/strong><\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> <strong>$0.73<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p><strong>January 2008<\/strong><br \/>\nI uploaded the rest of my backlog of photos over the first couple of weeks of January. It seemed to take forever! A couple of weeks of leaving my computer constantly. Some of this is probably a factor of the upload rate from my broadband provider, though.<\/p>\n<p>The bill was a bit high, but about half of it is the data upload cost for a backlog of years of digital photos, so it&#8217;s probably more of a setup than an ongoing cost.<\/p>\n<table width=\"100%\" style=\"background-color: #eeeeee\">\n<tr>\n<td>$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used  <\/td>\n<td> 15.789 GB-Mo<\/td>\n<td> 2.37<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.10 per GB &#8211; all data transfer in <\/td>\n<td>19.812 GB <\/td>\n<td>1.98<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.18 per GB &#8211; data transfer out <\/td>\n<td>0.191 GB <\/td>\n<td>0.03<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests<\/td>\n<td>35627 Requests <\/td>\n<td>0.36<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.01 per 10,000 GET requests<\/td>\n<td>26061 Requests <\/td>\n<td>0.03<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Total<\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> 4.77<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>tax<\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> 0.84<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><strong>TOTAL<\/strong><\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> <strong>$5.61<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p><strong>February 2008<\/strong><br \/>\nThe first month where I only uploaded new photos taken that month. This is the sort of bill I can start to expect each month from now on, increasing by 15 cents each month for each GB of new photos and videos that I add.<\/p>\n<table width=\"100%\" style=\"background-color: #eeeeee\">\n<tr>\n<td>$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used  <\/td>\n<td> 23.087 GB-Mo<\/td>\n<td> 3.46<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.10 per GB &#8211; all data transfer in <\/td>\n<td>0.144 GB <\/td>\n<td>0.01<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.18 per GB &#8211; data transfer out <\/td>\n<td>0.017 GB <\/td>\n<td>0.01<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests<\/td>\n<td>1233 Requests <\/td>\n<td>0.01<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>$0.01 per 10,000 GET requests<\/td>\n<td>1144 Requests <\/td>\n<td>0.01<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Total<\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> 3.50<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>tax<\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> 0.61<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><strong>TOTAL<\/strong><\/td>\n<td> <\/td>\n<td> <strong>$4.11<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p>There are other <strong>good bits<\/strong> worth mentioning &#8211; I signed up to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jungledisk.com\/plus.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">Jungle Disk Plus<\/a> early enough that I got it for free for 12 months. Normally $1 a month, this gets you web access to your Amazon S3 storage. If I wanted to be able to download one of my backed-up photos from any Internet-connected machine, I can. I&#8217;ve not used this yet, but it&#8217;s a nice idea. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Problems?<\/strong> I&#8217;ve not had many. Migrating your settings to a new version of the Jungle Disk client when they come out with a new version is a bit clunky <strike>&#8211; seems that you have to re-enter your settings from scratch. It&#8217;s enough of a pain that I&#8217;m still a couple of versions behind on one of my machines. It&#8217;s not a major issue, but it&#8217;d be nice if they made the migration path a little easier.<\/strike> <em>If you use the USB version of the client, you have to make sure you don&#8217;t overwrite jungledisk-backup.xml and jungledisk-settings.ini with the empty copies in the zip file for each new version. Thanks to JungleDave for pointing this out in the comments below!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>And <a href=\"http:\/\/andypiper.wordpress.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Andy<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/andypiper\/statuses\/597001672\" target=\"_blank\">mentioned that he has had some problems when uploading files from a Mac but downloading from Windows<\/a>. I&#8217;ve used the Jungle Disk clients on Windows and Linux, but for separate uses only and not tried mixing them &#8211; so I&#8217;ve not seen this myself.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, I&#8217;ve been very happy with it. I&#8217;m certainly happier knowing that my photos are somewhere safe. And for two or three quid a month, this feels like good value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve mentioned Jungle Disk in a few tweets before, but now I&#8217;ve got my first few bills from them, I thought I&#8217;d write a longer post about what they&#8217;re like. For the uninitiated, Jungle Disk is an application that lets you use Amazon&#8217;s S3 storage as an online file store and backup service. You can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[74,116,133,134],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web","tag-amazon","tag-backup","tag-jungle-disk","tag-s3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}