Jungle Disk on Linux

I first heard about Jungle Disk on the Linux Action Show. It is a client that manages files on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). The client is cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac OS) and costs only a one-time fee of $20 plus $1 a month if you want the optional "extra" services including a web interface to your files.

With Jungle Disk, you pay as you go for file storage: 15 cents/gig/month for storage and a similar low fee for data transfer. You can use S3 as a virtual drive or "briefcase" with unlimited capacity, or you can use it as a backup location for automated or manual backups from various computers. I use it for both.

So far I've setup my Ubuntu desktop and Windows laptop from work as well as my Ubuntu desktop at home. I have backups configured for important files from each of those. From my eee PC, I passed on installing Jungle Disk and instead relied on the web interface that came with the Jungle Disk extras. I don't store any files on my eee, so I don't need a client to back anything up.

So far I'm very pleased with Jungle Disk. It will get pricey as I start to backup everything including the 50+ gigs of photos, videos, and music files I have. 50 gigs would be $90 a year. However, this is well worth it if I ever need to recover my precious files in the event of a fire or multi-hard drive crash. Photos and videos especially are irreplaceable.

I took some notes on setting up Jungle Disk on Ubuntu:

* Sign up for Amazon S3.

* Download and unzip Jungle Disk (jungledisk.tar.gz) in /opt.

* Run Jungle Disk Monitor:
./junglediskmonitor

* Install FUSE and davfs:
apt-get install fuse-utils
apt-get install davfs2

* Add your user to the fuse group:
sudo adduser kweiner fuse

Create and mount a directory to access Jungle Disk on the file system:
sudo mkdir /mnt/jungledisk sudo chgrp fuse /mnt/jungledisk sudo chmod g+w /mnt/jungledisk sudo mount.davfs http://localhost:2667 /mnt/jungledisk -o nolocks