Well, Jungledisk has driven me bananas for the last time. As I blogged back in October and December, I have been messing around with using Jungledisk as a front end to Amazon’s insanely cheap online storage services, S3. Want to save 20 gigabytes of photo and music files? It’s just $3 a month, plus a modest bandwidth fee for your transfers.
But, perhaps not surprisingly for a company run by a guy like Jeff Bezos, S3 is designed for gods of the command line, Unix geeks and anyone who thinks “easy to use” is for wimps. So you need some software to help mediate the connection. Jungledisk, available for Mac and Windows, lets you mount your S3 storage area just like a regular network drive. Then you hit upon the other big challenge to using S3, which we can’t blame on Bezos: the lowly upload rates that Comcast (and most broadband providers) deign to provide me. Jungledisk tries to work around that by caching data on your own hard drive but in my case that meant it was taking up far too much precious space on my Powerbook. And not only were transfers slow, but Jungledisk would take 10 or more MIN UTES just to display a directory of my S3 files. On Windows, this delay didn’t occur so maybe some future re-write will solve the problem.
In the meantime, I’ve switched to what I had thought was just an ordinary FTP client. It turns out that the venerable FTP software Interarchy has added a host of S3 features allowing me to manage my cheap online space quickly and easily, at least while I wait for my files to upload. It even let me delete the files that Jungledisk had uploaded (which only Jungledisk can read).
A final note for those others dabbling with S3 — I discovered Interarchy’s new powers on this list of software and services for S3 maintained by Amazon.
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