Amazon offers, at 15 cents per gigabyte, a very affordable backup solution on their S3 Internet cloud infrastructure.

Jungle Disk is a subscription file backup service. Customers are billed monthly for gigabytes of files stored and transferred. The free desktop software provided facilitates the configuration of scheduled backups.

Access to your files is as easy as double-clicking on the disk icon now available under “Computer” on your local computer. You can also backup and get to your files from any computer using a web browser and going to “myjungledisk.com”.

Security is also addressed with Jungle Disk by allowing you to optionally encrypt your files being backed up.

Your initial monthly fee will may appear larger than you’d expect but this is due to the charges for the more significant first time upload costs. Upload fees are 10 cents per gigabyte, dowloads 17 cents per gigabyte. After your first upload, only changes need to be transferred. So if you haven’t added or changed any files, there are no upload fees. My experience is that monthly fees are in the range of a couple of dollars up to $20 or more if I’ve added significant data to my storage.

Features of the Jungle Disk service:

• Unlimited storage – 15 cents per gigabyte
• Pay only for the space you use – not minimum charge per month
• You files are encrypted and therefore secure from prying eyes
• Reliability – Amazon has multiple redundant data-centers strategically located around the country
• Backups are easy to configure and reports can be sent to your inbox daily

More detail can be found here: Jungle Disk Reliability

Support is stellar

Amazon’s support is a reference template for all companies to use. If you’ve used Amazon to purchase anything you’ll know what I mean. Jungle Disk is no exception. Online comprehensive help, including videos and tutorials, walk you through all the details. If you cannot find what you need in the prepared text you can also visit the Jungle Disk support forum where lots of users congregate to share what they know.

One obvious disadvantage of Jungle Disk or any remote storage is that you’re out in the cold if the site goes offline and your only backup is located online. While this has happened more than once in the past couple of years at Amazon, one can accept that risk knowing that their files are available nearly 100% of the time.

Still, many are comforted knowing that their files are available locally on their external backup drive, for example. One must also understand however, that hard drives fail and the larger the drive, the more data is at risk. And then there’s the unexpected – robbery, fire, flood, etc. It’s just prudent to know the risks, local or remote. There’s nothing wrong with having two backups, just in case.

Amazon’s Jungle Disk is just one online backup solution available on the Internet. Just Google “online backup” and you’ll see what I mean. When it comes to the safety of your precious photos and other files, you should go with a company that has a good name, references, and you’d expect to be in business in ten years or more. Amazon has been around since before the first Internet bubble and I expect them to be around for a long time going forward.

That’s my take on it, tell us what you think.

How often do you backup? What’s that, you don’t backup? Do it now please.