Jungle Disk, WebDAV server backed up by Amazon S3

Jungle Disk is a new S3-backed remote hard drive.

The idea behind Jungle Disk is that it's a WebDAV server that runs on your local machine that uses the Amazon S3 service as a backing storage. You can mount this service as a drive on your disk and use it transparently as backup or storage or for active use. The server caches things so you minimize transactions to the remote end.

Cost? Software is free (beta), the S3 storage is cheap compared to most Unix-based file system hosting.

I installed it on my Mac and never managed to connect, with an error message of
xCreateDirectoryFailed (28) at JDCacheManager.cpp

but it's such a cool idea I'm willing to continue on.

(for the "backups" category that I don't have)

UPDATE: see comments - if you are installing the app in a directory that's not writable, you need to edit the preferences file to point the cache somewhere writable.

UPDATE 2: TechCrunch has an hour-long podcast interview on Amazon S3.

Update 3: they're up to version 1.13 beta - here are the new Jungle Disk release notes.

Technorati Tags: amazon, aws, jungledisk, s3

Comments

[Daniel Drucker]

Where is the jungle disk application? By default, it's trying to create its "cache" directory in a subdirectory directly under the application. Maybe it doesn't have permissions for that?

Try changing the cache directory in its ini file (should be in Library/Preferences/jungledisk-settings.ini ) to go somewhere else.
E.g.:
CacheDirectory=/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Applicat ion Support/Jungle Disk/Cache

[Edward]

That did the trick.

I had moved the JungleDisk application to /Applications, where it belongs. (So naturally it didn't have permissions to write config files there.)

Do you need to toss in a little config file editor so people can tweak that .ini settings file neatly?

[Edward]

more errors:

NoSuchKeyThe specified key does not exist.1._-DS__Store.file

after what I thought was a successful file save.

[Edward]

If you're thinking about using Jungle Disk, be sure to read some of the release notes here:

http://www.jungledisk.com/relnotes.shtml

Known issues in 1.02 beta for Mac OS X include these:

# MACOSX: Finder encodes UTF8 filenames slightly differently than other platforms. If you use your Jungle Disk between OSX and other platforms at the same time, some filenames may display differently on the other platforms. This should not affect your ability to copy or use the files however.
# MACOSX: Executables cannot currently be launched from a mapped Jungle Disk. Copy the application locally before running it.
# MACOSX: OSX does not encode + characters correctly in URLs. Files uploaded with a "+" character in them will show up with a space instead.

I've backed off on trying to use this for routine backups for a bit, but that said I'm eager to pick up the next beta to see which of the rough edges have been smoothed off.

[howardgr]

Ed:
I've been able to make Jungle disk work on my mac, though it definetly needs some work - when there are "connect failed - retry" errors you don't know if everything you asked it to copy is copied.

I have found, though that using the s3DAV client http://www.carion.org/s3dav/index.html
I have been able to copy files to an Amazon s3 Bucket from my PC and see them on my Mac.

The instructions for the PC were on the site and were easy (I did use the Net Disk util as they suggsted to mount the drive on my PC as a letter drive.)

Using the same file (it's Java based) on the Mac I was able to go to finder ..go...connect to server...http://localhost:8070/
and then was able to copy files back and forth via S3. Very slick.

I got my s3 bill for this month. $.03 - now if I could just see what I'm actually holding there, this would be great.

[Edward]

In Jungle Disk news, they were acquired by Rackspace:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/rackspace-acquires-jungledisk-slicehost-to-take-on-amazon-web-services/

and said to be also doing a "cloud files" version of the backing store in addition to S3.

I think my S3 bill is something like a penny a month these days.