I swear I got half a husky when I first saw Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). It is basically pay-per-use unlimited digital storage with the high-availability infrastructure of Amazon. For a developer, it is a (cheap) storage solution that will grow with your start-up application. Start-ups have got to love this thing 
Being someone who has about three distinct home directory backups floating around (don’t ask), taking up space on my hard-drives, I’ve been looking for a (cheap) place to store that data. S3 looked like a good solution: 20GB would only cost $3.40 per month.
But S3 is only a web-service. To get the data there, you must use a client. I guess I’ll have to write one…Oh yeah, it’s the Web. A thousand other people have already had the same idea and already done it! Enter Jungle Disk.
Jungle Disk works by establishing a WebDAV service on your machine that connects to S3. You can then browse the files on your S3 “bucket” via your operating-system’s file browser. They have versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
S3 Browser is a separate, open-source project that seems to be starting up to do the same thing, but Jungle Disk is way more developed/user-friendly at the moment.
The only part of Jungle Disk that is a little awkward is signing up for a web-service account from Amazon. I couldn’t see someone who isn’t a geek going through the steps. I’m sure it’s only a matter-of-time until Jungle Disk starts a service to sign-up through them for a few pennies on top of the Amazon fees. Either way, I’m sure this won’t be the last application to use the S3 platform for backup
Hi,
you’re right, Jungle Disk is not the only application using S3. Our service podmailing.com also uses S3, for transferring large e-mail attachments. It even makes use of S3’s BitTorrent support for P2P delivery.
Give it a try. The S3-based system is activated when you send a Podmail with the “Express” option turned on.
Nice, did you use a library to build your app, or is it all custom?