I’ve recently been experimenting with both JungleDisk and jetS3t for backups. I like the command-line driven jetS3t, but must admit that some new features are being rolled into JungleDisk that I really like. In particular, the most recent version (1.25) of JungleDisk supports:
- Fast file copying / renaming / moving without the need to re-upload (YES!)
- AES encryption with up to 256 bit keys
- Keep modification timestamp for backed up files
- Optional SSL for connections to S3 (for a second layer of encryption in transit)
- Auto mount/un-mount volume on OSX
The next version (1.30) is apparently going to support three awesome features:
- Backup history / logs
- Backup of in-use files
- Incremental backup of only the changed portion of large files (YES! YES!)
The last feature—incrementally backing up only changed portions of large files—is awesome. This means I can have large databases (eg. Yojimbo) and back them up regularly, but the whole DB does not get copied every time I make a change.
In the next few days, I’ll start digging into some of Tom’s other questions on this theme of backups—in particular, I want to hit version control. Version control provides the busy author with a way of saving every single incremental change to their documents, as well as some comments and metadata about the nature of those changes. This way, you can do things like cut a whole chapter from a book, or a paragraph, or similar… and not worry about “loosing” it, because it will always be preserved in your version control history. If you decide you want the content back, you just go browsing, and viola, you have your text back.
This post is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Uncategorized 
I will follow your commentary about these new-to-me backup facilities — they do sound interesting. And I’m particularly eager to read your thoughts about version control.
By the way, what plug-in are you using that adds the “sequence” of posts at the top. A useful tool.
Glad you like the feature progression in Jungle Disk. Funny that you should mention version control next, as that is going to be one of our top post-1.30 features.
Hi Tom,
The “plug-in” for the sequence at the top is, erhm, a “Matt Plug-In”. That means Matt finds the URLs for the previous posts, and writes the HTML for that line. So, I guess that makes it a “manual plug-in”, or… well, just me writing some HTML.
And Dave, yes, I do like the feature progression. The use of EC2 for some of the nifty trickery on the back-end is very slick, also. Jungle Disk is progressing from a tool that was a novelty (at the start) to something that has a lot of very useful and powerful features for backup. That, I think, is great. Keep up the excellent work!