Geek: Data Woes into Data Woo!

Turns out I don't have to spend $1200 recover my defunct drive for the missing 1GB. Jungle Disk to the rescue! (http://www.jungledisk.com) I completely missed I had set the two top level folders to automatically backup every *6* hours, since it's been operating for months it got all the 15GB, and since it only operates on deltas and doesn't delete so everything is there! Which includes many business receipt files I just discovered were part of the missing folder collection. It was actually so easy to setup the backup and JungleDisk does this during installation it probably only took 5 minutes to setup, thus me forgetting about it and continuing to use the old paradigms.

If your not familiar with it Jungle Disk is a utility for windows that appears as a virtual drive that uses Amazon's S3 Storage cluster, for inexpensive pay-as-you-go reliable data storage. It costs me about $8 a month for my 16GB current backup/access needs, with frequent traffic of changes.


Here's some things from their FAQ:
http://www.jungledisk.com/backup.shtml

Jungle Disk makes it easy to automatically back up your important files to your secure remote Amazon S3 ™ storage.
To configure automatic backup, use the "Automatic Backup" tab in the configuration dialog.

When automatic backup is configured, Jungle Disk will check for changed files and back them up automatically at the requested interval. You can also choose to have automatic backup run manually by selecting the "Manual" option and using the "Start backup now" menu item under the Backup menu in Jungle Disk Monitor. You can temporarily pause automatic backups by unchecking the "Next Automatic Backup" menu item. You can always run a backup immediately using the "Start backup now" menu item (unless a backup is already in progress).

Q:Are files that are deleted locally deleted from the backup as well?
A: By default files that are backed up are never automatically deleted. The Backup Cleanup feature on the Backup menu can be used to remove backed up files that are no longer present locally. You will be able to preview the files before they are deleted.

UPDATE:

1) Trolling the backup on A3 for other contents.

I just discovered it has a complete image of my drive from months ago that has a file of frequently used code snippets that got overwritten away by upgrading the program to beta, or me doing something wrong. This is many hours of research and optimizing over the last years. WOo! In the process I also discovered I can swap phrase files by just double clicking on them, opening up the possibilities for language/application specific using the same hot keys. Woo! Woo!

2) My tablet PC (my spare machine) is going to get serviced, power connector doesn't stay connected making it a constant fiddle. I am using jungleDisk to store an clone of the drive lest it fail or need reformatting. The autobackup, uses the full path of the file (e.g. S3/backups/machinename/driveletter/folder/folder/file) making it very easy to use
jungledisk with multiple machines and only one bucket/s3 account.

Since jungledisk mounts the s3 as a virtual drive, it's not really different than any other network disk, all machines can write to it, jungleDisk maintains a local cache so you're not incurring cost overhead everytime. It's not particularly speedy if your using wireless and rapid updates, for that a local drive is still better. What I will do when the spare gets back is make it responsible for cloning the 1TB 'cache' of the data. S3 will be the backup.

Next time I reinstall the OS. I'll be migrating to VMWare instead of using the raw OS for work, and putting these on S3 as well, along with using secure email and online notepads for configuration details. This means if in my travels or new machines, once the hardware is basically setup, the complex setup of my development environments and projects will already be up and running, with just downloading jungle disk, and the disk image. Or if I opted to get a contractor up and running they could also get setup in minutes. The new version of the VMWare supports running images off of a flash drive, so it could very easily be that the machine with all apps and an SVN verison of the data I'm working with could be on a disposable flash drive.

It's easy to see how this might be extended to developing web projects. Having a team edit a s3 bucket through jungledisk, and those files being accessed via SC2 or your own hosts for app logic and scaling. Apparently Amazon has a que service to make writes to the S3 in a way that should fit into highly saleability web app architecture.

That said all netbackup is subject to availability of network or connectivity to it. As today when I started trying to backup the tablePC drive, we've had intermittent web access due to a failing dsl modem. Which jungledisk did a good job of retrying. But to depend on this soley for critical data might not be a great idea. Flash drives are a great. My favorite is compact flash with a PC/card reader so you don't know that it's there. At the time of writing this 16GB is $160, which should be good enough for most non-video projects.
http://www.pricewatch.com/flash_card_memory/

3) In the process of getting rid of my desktop towers, that stopped working after a new power supply to ironically support a better backup solution via new harddrives, I gave it to a tech repair friend, along with 1TB drive to copy off the 2x320GB data that was on the machine. He got the machine in exchange for the work. While I could repeat the process and ship back a replacement drive (1TB) to him, what I may end up doing is just have him backup to S3 bucket, then change the bucket/id.