Yet another reason to dig Amazon …
A few months back when Amazon debuted the DRM-free MP3′s, they also released software to download the MP3′s from their site. This downloader wasn’t essential for individual tracks, but was necessary to download entire albums. Guess what happened when I wasn’t looking? They made good on their promise to release a Linux version. I just happened to learn this from reading Stephen O’Grady’s site where he mentioned it though it isn’t working well for him. For me, It works great. Thanks Amazon … you’ve just ensured I’ll be spending more money. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day here’s me buying a Dropkick Murphys album:
Welcome to the Jungle … Disk!
Your hard drive is going to die one day. Your house could burn down. Someone could steal your computer. Only the first statement is an inevitability. The other two are reasons why you can’t totally rely on local external storage like a NAS or the redundancy provided by a RAID array.
So what are you going to do about it? You have several options. You can use Mozy (recently acquired by EMC), Carbonite, or one of the front-ends for Amazon’s S3. I’d kicked around duplicity and s3sync but I wasn’t pleased. To get the benefits of encryption, I’d have to use the version of duplicity in the not-yet-released version of Ubuntu and I’d heard rumor that s3sync wasn’t always reliable for some users. I’d heard good things about Jungle Disk, so I figured I’d give it a shot. First, it supports Linux, Mac, and Windows, upgrades are free forever, and one license can be used on any number of computers in my household. For $20, that’s not a bad deal.
You can connect over SSL and all files uploaded to S3 are encrypted before they are transmitted. You can keep copies of changed and/or deleted files. You can map a virtual volume that is treated like a normal filesystem; copy files in and they’re automatically backed up. I’ve been encrypting and backing up system configurations and am about to start backing up more and more.
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