BACKUP: Create easy online backups with Jungle Disk and Amazon S3

from Lifehacker

Tech columnist Mike Elgan has found what he considers the ultimate backup solution: Jungle Disk, a front end for Amazon's S3 storage service.

Jungle Disk puts a virtual drive on your computer that looks like any another hard drive. Unlike "regular" backups systems, you can browse, open, check and confirm the validity of every file in your backup by simply opening the folder, and using the files as if they were on your local hard drive. They're not locked away in a cryptic, proprietary system.

The Jungle Disk application lets you set up automated backups, which looks for any file changes in the files or folders you specify, then backs up any modified files at the frequency you set. You set it and forget it.

Jungle Disk is free while in beta; down the road it'll cost you $20 or $1 per month. As for S3, it's a pay-as-you-go service that costs 15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 20 cents per gigabyte of data transferred.

Those are pretty affordable rates, but you can accomplish almost exactly the same thing with MediaMax and Mozy, both of which are free. What do you think? Put your online-backup thoughts where they belong: the comments! —Rick Broida