Ever since I bought my newest iMac, it’s become the central repository for almost all of my data. My MacBook Pro, which I primarily use for work, only has files on there that I might need for current projects and reports. With all of my pictures, music and documents congregating in one location I’ve been looking for a new storage solution. Currently I’m keeping all of my pictures on an external drive. My music is saved on a second external drive which also serves as back up for the first external. And then I have a third drive which backs up the second and severs as storage for less important or transitory files. I’m proactively trying to keep as many important files off of my internal drive as possible.

The main things I’m looking for in my back up solution is

1. Expansive storage
2. Offsite duplication
3. Automation

I had heard about Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and the low cost of moving and storing data on their servers. It wasn’t until I learned about Jungle Disk that S3 started making sense as a possible answer to my backup problem.

Already having an Amazon account, setting up a web services account was very simple. Jungle Disk, as most Mac OS X applications, was a breeze to install and walked me through a simple set up to use my S3 account as both an automatic backup location and as a network drive. The initial backup of all my data is approximately 105GB and as of this post I’ve already received several errors that some of my files (specifically the hard drive clones of previous decommissioned machines that I keep on my drives) exceed the 5GB maximum and were not backed up.