Interesting thread. I did a piece on this for Macbreak a but ago and I will summarize it here. In my testing, the Amazon S3 service was the best overall choice when used with a decent S3 client. The pricing is very cheap and the service has been pretty reliable. Several big name photosites actually use the S3 service on their own backend. In my personal case, I use it with Jungledisk (Windows, OSX, Linux) to back up key PSD files and key JPGs. I run about 10 gig on the servers right now. My backups cost me about 2 bucks a month. I did buy a second DSL line with 700Kbps upload speed (cable was limited to 300 kbps) and I have some custom route statements on my Mac to send all Jungledisk/S3 traffic over the DSL link.
Jungledisk also offers HTTPS access to the file, not just their own client. Other apps like Transmit is now S3 smart.
Is S3 perfect? hardly but it saved my bacon a few months back when something ate my Photoshop directory on my external disk. What I do now is run a Terastation RAID5 for local restores and I use S3 for emergency and offsite storage since I do live in a firezone.
Here is my original review which needs to be updated to reflect some changes to the product. But not today
Product Name:
Jungledisk
Pricing
List price: $ 20.00 USD
Free Download
Specs/From the website:
You can copy files to it using Explorer (or Finder on Mac). When you copy a file to your Jungle Disk it is encrypted and uploaded in the background to Amazon.com's servers.
Amazon S3™ provides a set of web services for web-scale, fast, reliable storage. They store your data in multiple data centers around the country for complete redundancy.
Jungle Disk runs on your local machine as a WebDAV server. WebDAV is a protocol for remote file access supported by all modern operating systems.
As you copy data to your Jungle Disk, it is transparently cached, encrypted, and uploaded to Amazon.com. Since uploads occur in the background, copying files to your Jungle Disk is as fast as a local hard drive.
When you browse your Jungle Disk, if the data is already available in the local cache nothing is downloaded from Amazon, which makes Jungle Disk super efficient
Features:
* Not just a "backup" application.
* Automatic scheduled backups
* Load and run from a USB keyfob (thumbdrive) on ANY system, not just your home system
* Can be managed by third party tools such as ChronoSync or SynBack
* No restrictions on the amount of data sent to Amazon's S3 servers
* No minimum tier of cost, you pay for as little or as much space you use
* Cross platform application, supports Macs, Windows and Linux so you can put or get data from any one to the other
* Source code is available to browse and download your data even if Jungledisk were to "disappear"
* Data is encrypted on Amazon's S3 servers
* For extra cost of one dollar a month, you can have HTTP access to your files without having to use Jungledisk client
* Supports block copies so only changed data is copied up to servers
1st Impression:
The 1st impression was this application was too easy to do everything they claimed or there was a catch somewhere. No catch, the software works well and is very stable. Performance of the uploads and downloads are limited by your pipe. Both worked well over DSL, Cable and EVDO while on the road.
Install:
Typical Mac installation of copying the file to the application folder. You do need to set up an Amazon S3 account but Jungledisk has a wizard that takes you through the process. You will need to get a pair of security keys from Amazon before you can complete the installation.
Use:
This is a very easy application to use. You can use the Jungledisk monitor to make real time backups or configure the scheduler and what to snap. Or you can just double click on the Jungledisk mount point and drag your files in or out.
The new HTTP access make what was easy so easy a brain dead zombie can get to their data. With HTTP you can access your Jungledisk data from virtually any platform that supports a web browser and secure socket or SSL.
Other Notes:
Since this application uses the Amazon S3 service, there is additional cost from Amazon over and above the cost of the application but it is very cheap. The uploading of six gig of images to the S3 servers cost me 90 cents.
Negatives:
Webdev and online backups are still a technology in the beginning stages. You need to understand at least the basics even with a well written application like Jungledisk. This might not be the application for your mom and dad trying to archive their pictures.
Jungle disk is not "smart" about file relocation since there is not any kind of pre-scan before the backup starts. (NOTE: This has changed in the newest version) So if you move a file to a new folder, it will recopy the file completely thinking it's new.
Positives
Works very well and is reliable both in the home, office and on the road. The price is right on both the application and the S3 service. No interference with anything else.
Fatal Flaw (what would cause you NOT to buy it?)
None so far.
Competition
Other tools like Transmit FTP now has S3 upload/download capabilities built in to them but Jungledisk is still one of the easiest and cheapest to use. It is one of the few if not the only one that offer all three platforms and the ability to run off a USB thumbdrive.