Working with Amazon S3

Any comments on the speed of the Jungle Drive - S3 combination? iDisk
is painfully slow and I'm looking for an alternative that is as
simple to use as iDisk is.

Thanks,
David Garrison

At 12:41 06/28/06 -0700, David Garrison wrote:
>Any comments on the speed of the Jungle Drive - S3 combination? iDisk
>is painfully slow and I'm looking for an alternative that is as
>simple to use as iDisk is.

Last night I tried JungleDisk (on a Windows XP machine, with Netdrive to
provide drive letter mapping, one of those stupid ugly tricks required
under Windows). I found the upload to be slow: I was seeing about
225KB/sec. The CPU on my machine was loafing, I was on a 100Mb/s LAN, and
the LAN had a T3 Internet connection. So I am assuming that the speed limit
was at the Amazon end. I posted questions about this situation to the
JungleDisk forum (http://forum.jungledisk.com/viewtopic.php?t=167) but have
not yet received a response.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

--On June 28, 2006 12:41:27 PM -0700 David Garrison <dave_listyesmag.ca>
wrote:

> Any comments on the speed of the Jungle Drive - S3 combination? iDisk
> is painfully slow and I'm looking for an alternative that is as
> simple to use as iDisk is.

You can try box.net with 1GB for free, but it isn't anywhere near as easy
as iDisk yet.

http://www.box.net/

They don't have WebDAV support or a dedicated Mac synchronize client (they
say they're working on a mac client, but their windows client hasn't even
shipped yet) but I paid $50 for 5GB a year, much better than dotMac
(especially since Apple seems to have dropped a lot of the free giveaways
other than Jam Packs for Garageband.)

Currently I drag and drop what I want to backup to the service (i've used
the flash client from my Mac), and it's saved my rear a few times when I
needed to transfer a file that was too big for e-mail and I'd forgotten my
thumbdrive.

You can e-mail files into storage too, although I haven't tried this yet, I
already have an automated e-mail (to Google mail) backup on my server for
certain files, perhaps I'll add a secondary copy to box.net.

They have an XML based API that let's people write their own clients (I
asked Interarchy for support for box.net, but understandably they can't put
the development into something just starting out, unlike Amazon.)

edward wrote:

I found the upload to be slow: I was seeing about 225KB/sec.

You did not say whether that is bytes or bits. I just tried using Interarchy to upload a 10Meg file and got around 70-80 K bytes/second, which is close to the limit of our 1Megabit ADSL upload speed. Download speeds were about twice that. Both speeds varied alot, so I wouldn't put much stake in it, but then we are in Australia, so a bit of variation in network speed is pretty normal for us.

I just wrote up a small article about how I've worked Interarchy/
Amazon S3 into my backup workflow (for anyone interested):

<http://matt.makalumedia.com/2006/07/01/amazon-for-quick-backup>

Kind regards,

--
Matt Henderson | MakaluMedia Group
                 | Software Systems Engineering & Consultancy
                 | http://makalumedia.com/
                 | mattmakalumedia.com