I subscribed to Amazon's S3 service a while back, but couldn't find a good app that to integrate it into my desktop to use easily. S3 gives you some pretty raw capabilities for storage, but nothing that easily translates into something easy to use for the average joe. I received an e-mail from Amazon the other day pointing me to a bunch of applications out there that provide desktop integration. I played with all of them and settled on Jungle Disk. It sites on your desktop, takes your account info and allows you to treat S3 like a drive I can use for storage.

I'm storing 40GB of data on S3, backing up images and documents, with about 2GB of data throughput per month and only paying $6/month. Amazing. Think about what it would cost to have a secure, redundant data environment that you know you're not going to lose. If my house were to burn down, the first thing I'd grab after taking my kids, would be my computer with our digital video and digital images for the past 5 years. I'm throwing my document archive out there, but I haven't found a way to easily update and sync with those dynamically. I think I can use Microsoft's SyncToy to sync up my file system up with S3.

Tags: Amazon's S3 Service, Jungle Disk, Microsoft SyncToy