Jungle Disk – Amazon.com has an amazing new service that appears to be taking off. The service is named S3 – or Simple Storage Services. Essentially, it makes disk storage an “Internet Attached” service accessible to programmers via a set of web APIs. What makes S3 a big deal is the pricing model: $.20 per GB of data transferred and $.15 per GB/month of data stored. If you do the math, this is dirt cheap given that your file objects are stored redundantly at Amazon’s formidable data centers and securely available from anywhere on the net. Many new start-ups are using the S3 for their storage needs and bypassing the purchase of storage farms for their operation. Up until now, this was a ho-hum for the average user – but now – there are several open software solutions which extend the power of S3 to everyone.

One of these recently started using is Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com). Essentially you download the JungleDisk client for your Windows / MacOS of Linux platform ( I use all three) – and configure the software with your own Amazon S3 storage keys – then voila! You have a secure virtual drive that works from anywhere on the Internet, on any computer you have. Under the hood, Jungledisk works as a so-called WebDAV Proxy process – so you access your files through a WebDAV interface included in all modern OS’s. So far, I am impressed by JungleDisk’s usability and stability. Another beauty of S3 is becoming supported by a variety of vendors – so your data is not hostage to JungleDisk – you can always try other S3 client programs for your computers. No more tape or CD back-ups for me, JungleDisk/S3 is the way to go!