There’s been much buzz and anticipation surrounding Google’s unconfirmed, online storage service nicknamed by the media as G Drive. The idea however is far from new. There’s been software available to connect an FTP site as a local drive for years, however it’s always been kind of clunky and signing up for a hosting account at $10 per month or more, just to access a few files is most of the time overkill for many users. I’ve been looking at backup solutions, to allow me to keep off-site and safe, around 50 gigabytes of data. In investigating one of the options, I found an interesting use, which matches the functionality offered by the so far nonexistent G Drive. This option comes in the form of one of Amazon’s web services, in particular S3 and a piece of freely available software.

S3 was launched a year or so ago and in one fail swoop, revolutionised the online data storage market. There had been services like this before, but Amazon took a hard look at what was offered and made theirs vastly cheaper, with an API that was easy to build systems atop. To give you some figures, you can store 1 gigabyte of information for the paltry amount of 0.15 cents per month. On top of this, there are usage / bandwidth charges, so this really works well for one way storage, i.e. backups, but needs to be used with careful consideration when used as a method of media distribution. Animoto, the photo service that turns your digital photographs into professional slideshow videos, uses the service to distribute the final video, which can be as large as 30 megabytes or more.

Anyway I’ll be covering online backup in more detail in a separate article, but when looking at Amazon’s S3 service, I needed something that would allow easy transfer of files to and from their servers. Jungle Disk was something I’d toyed with a while back, but then was a little flaky. Now it works rather well. As I mentioned before, it’s not so much backing up I want to concentrate on in this article, but rather providing universal access to files in a central storage area. Jungle Disk is a conduit for Amazon’s S3 service and has the great feature of allowing you to map a directory or bucket as Amazon calls them, to a local drive. I write lots of articles and reviews and previously stored all my stuff on Google’s word processing service, which allowed me access to my files from anywhere. My hosting service is painfully slow when editing via Wordpress, so I’ve been using one of the many standalone blogging applications. This however means I have to cut and paste reviews from Google to the application and then back again, if I am not ready to post the article. This becomes quite a bind and ends up being mostly unmanageable.

With Jungle Disk and Amazon S3, I now map a remote folder / bucket to my local U: drive (or drive of your choice, if it’s free) and can save and load to my hearts content. If I don’t finish an article, I can edit from anywhere where this setup is installed, in my case the office, my home desktop and home laptop, giving them all the same U: drive. It works surprisingly well. In my case I’m using a pittance of storage space, so would imagine my billing would be around 0.15 to 0.20 per month, if that.

There are many other similar types of services, XDrive from AOL being one of them. With XDrive however I find their software both unwieldy and unreliable. My laptop was forever having problems connecting, which means it’s just not a viable solution for me. It does however give you 5 gigabytes of storage for free, so may be something to look into, as it may just work for you. Jungle Disk on the other hand is a small 1.7 megabyte download and appears to use a paltry 2 megabytes of memory once installed. It works and works well., which is good enough for me. Remember however you will need to sign up for Amazon’s S3 service before being able to use Jungle Disk.

For serious users who want to use S3 for backing up large amounts of data, Jungle Disk can also help. It also has some additional paid features which help in moving large amounts of data and also a meagre $1 per month service which gives you even more features, including web access. There are clients for Windows, Mac and Linux and it’s even possible to run the client via a USB flash drive, giving you the ultimate flexibility.

For me however, S3 and Jungle Disk solve a need I’ve been having for a while. I now have a mapped U: drive on all the computers I use and can happily save and load data between them, for use in many applications. It is worth warning however, that while data transfer is fairly quick, assuming you have good network connectivity, it will not be something on which you would want to edit audio, video or large files where they are accessed a chunk at a time. For most documents, spreadsheets, images, etc, it should prove more than useful.

It will be interesting to see what Google’s G Drive offers, when or indeed if it launches. Until then S3 in conjunction with Jungle Disk is for me the perfect solution.

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