I’ve moved to Amazon S3. I can now store 1Gb of data online at $0.15 per month (Rs 5). Transfers cost $0.20 per Gb (Rs 6.50). This is extremely cheap for the peace of mind you can enjoy when you know “your data is safe sitting on Amazon’s geo-redundant servers right between some bits describing a new book from Oprah and a bad review on latest Ben Affleck movie!”
I have downloaded and started using Jungle Disk and it works great! Jungle Disk (simply said) allows you to mount your S3 online storage as a normal drive. It even caches data and transfers in the background so, in most cases, you don’t even think you are working online. It is multiplatform (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) and is free (for the time being – the source is also available)
This is all great… except for one major issue: I don’t want to do backups! I want synchronization!
Let me explain. I use my MacBook at home and one Linux PC at work. I want to be able to access my files both at home and at work. Naturally, I can do this by moving all my files to S3 and then use Jungle Disk to access them transparently. Unfortunately, this scheme does not work when the Internet connection is down and no local cached copy of the data exists. And having no Internet connection in our poor country is relatively common.
One solution would be to have the data locally on the MacBook and on the Linux PC. Then S3 would be used as an intermediate to synchronize the two computers. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do this. I’ve been reading about s3sync.rb and rsync (over the Jungle Disk mount) but I do not understand how to do file synchronization with them. I’ve also read about unison but I am not too confident of its performance with respect to S3…
Any idea?
