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