Jungle Disk Mini-Review: offsite data storage

Jungle Disk (from now on JD) is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com's S3 ™ Storage Service. Unlike other services, with Amazon S3 ™ there is no minimum and no maximum amount of data you can store.  You pay only for the actual amount of storage you are using. It supports 256-AES encryption if desired.

In practice it's possible to access the JD drive as a mapped network drive in explorer, over WebDav or via the local http server (JD Plus). JD keeps a local cache of 1GB by default which allows most operations to be instantaneous with any changes being made transparently in the background. There's an inbuilt backup utility included which works well and previous versions are kept if desired. This approach makes JD suitable for backup purposes as well as temporary file storage or as an remote filesystem as it will work with native copy tools such as robocopy, sync tools such as SyncToy and SFFS etc.

Version 2 (in development and tested here) includes some excellent refinements, partly based on user feedback, these include but are not limited to (see release notes):

• New User Interface
• Support for new Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets as well as Compatibility buckets, which can be shared with other S3 tools
• Support for connecting to multiple buckets at the same time
• Support for multiple backup jobs with independent scheduling
• Expanded bandwidth limiting feature
• New Previous Versions features
• Verify MD5 hash on downloads (as well as upload)