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Two days ago we had a hard drive catastrophe. I fired up iTunes and pressed play on the Party Shuffle. iTunes started hiccuping out the track and then up came the dreaded spinning beach ball, telling me wait since it was thinking really hard about something. This was not normal.

I waited for a bit and still nothing, just the spinning ball. Soon, the whole system froze up and crashed completely. Yuck.

I rebooted, which took ages. When OSX finally came to life, my external backup drive was missing from the desktop. ‘That’s no good,’ I thought. I ran some disk utilities (OSX Disk Utility & Disk Warrior), and came up empty handed. It seems there was a mechanical failure, as far as I can tell. Almost 220GB of trapped inside that dead drive.
Fortunately, it was my backup, so nothing critical was on it, but a couple of months ago I needed to free up some space so I moved my entire music library (over 60GB worth) over to the external drive. It was a highly rated FantomDrive and only a year old, so I felt pretty safe. The irony is, next week when we go home there is a 320GB Western Digital backup drive I ordered to backup the backup that just died. It could have waited a week and a half to die, couldn’t it??

I still have some hope. Once I have the new drive in hand, I’m going to try out a data recovery program for the Mac, DataRescue II, that I heard about. It’s a last ditch effort, but it’s worth a shot.

Anyway, this little scenario has woken me up to just how valuable (and fragile) data is, and how important a sound backup strategy really is. Right now, I’ve got four years of priceless digital photos sitting on my hard drive, vulnerable until I can back them up again. I’ve got the drive at home, but what if my iBook’s drive crashes too between now and then? That’s scary.

In comes JungleDisk. JungleDisk uses Amazon’s new online storage service, S3, to create a virtual drive that mounts on your system like a regular network drive. Instead of your data being stored in one vulnerable location, though, data on your JungleDisk is stored at multiple datacenters. Distributed, redundant backups- very good thing. On top of that, all data is encrypted, you can schedule automatic backups and space is unlimited. Here’s an excerpt from their site:

What is Jungle Disk?

Jungle Disk is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com’s S3 â„¢ Storage Service.

• Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
• No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
• Your data is fully encrypted at all times
• Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
• Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux

So, I’m really tickled pink to find this. Paired with automatic backup to our external drives, JungleDisk will help us create a really simple, very safe solution to protecting our data.

This little story also reinforces the ideas I discussed in my Society and Technology discussion post the other day- high bandwidth internet has changed the game, and moving data and applications off the desktop and on to the servers can be really beneficial to the end users like you and I. Case in point.

-A.

p.s. Geek Notes: Is it fast? Speeds will be determined by the bandwidth of your connection, of course, and will vary, but I uploaded 225MB in a minute and twenty seconds today. That’s pretty darn fast. Also, to clarify- you only pay when you play…15 cents per month, per GB, and 20 cents per GB of bandwidth used. Phenomenally cheap. There’s no file sharing option or web access interface yet (like Xdrive), but there is talk that these features are forthcoming on their FAQ.