Daily Nerdy

The Problem

After reading about Authorize.net’s fun holiday weekend adventure of a fire in their data center, I decided that I better find a solution to automatically backup my servers data and database dumps to an off-site location just in-case the unthinkable ever happened.

Basically what I have is full drive images taken weekly and daily MySQL and Microsoft SQL database backups that need to be stored off-site. I have known about Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for months but it is difficult to setup and requires custom coding and integration via their API. Also, all this gibberish of AWS key, AWS hash, AWS username, and such just flustered me. I also caught wind of Mosso Cloud Files which is a service by RackSpace. While Cloud Files looks very promising on its own, it again requires API integration to automate the backup process.

Tah Dah… Introducing Jungle Disk

There must be an easier way? Then I stumbled across Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk combines the power of using Amazon’s respected infrastructure and reliability, but packages everything into a nice and easy GUI and web interface. But Wait… That’s not it… Order today and you also get full integration with Rack Space Mosso Cloud Files as well. Sorry, that was my tribute to Billie Mays.

Jungle Disk allows you to create disks of either flavor; S3 or Cloud Files via their beautiful ajax rich web interface. Also through the web interface you can create additional users and assign them permissions to disks for $2 per month per user extra. Then simply using their client applications you can push files to the cloud. Their client applications are available for almost every popular operating system; Windows, OSX and Linux.

Jungle Disk Benefits

• Highly Scalable Infrastructure With Multiple Datacenters Equals Reliability
• Cost Of Entry Is Essentially Nothing
• Pay For What You Use
• Unlimited Number Of Disks
• Multiple Users With Permissions
• Secured SSL Encrypted Storage

Private Storage Only

The one thing Jungle Disk does not do is double as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). All files pushed to Jungle Disk are private and cannot be accessed by the public internet. If you need CDN capability Jungle Disk is not your solution, try Amazon’s CloudFront instead. Unfortunately, CloudFront requires API integration and all that gibberish I spoke about above.

Pricing

The cost is $2 a month base ($2 for each additional user) and a pay for what you use model. Amazon S3 storage is $0.15 per gigabyte and data transfer is $0.10 for uploads and $0.17 for downloads per gigabyte. Rackspace Cloud Files is also $0.15 per gigabyte storage and bandwidth is currently unbilled. That’s right, free bandwidth when using Mosso Cloud Files.

Conclusion

Jungle Disk was absurdly easy to implement and the only complaint I have was that I had to restart the Windows 2003 servers after installing the client. But that is more of a beef with Microsoft and their shitty operating systems then Jungle Disk. Their support is amazing! I had a few questions after signing up, and I kid you not, thirty seconds after I created my support ticket I already had a response from some fellow named JungleJosh. I highly recommend Jungle Disk, not only for businesses and corporate users, but also for personal (school documents, photo and video libraries) backups as well.