If you’ve got data you want to hold on to, and be sure that it’s properly backed up, but on the cheap, you might want to consider the excellent combination of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service and an OS X open source client called S3 Browser.
Amazon on their Storage Service:
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
On pricing:
Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
$0.20 per GB of data transferred.
That’s a pretty good offer… and Amazon are the kind of people who I would trust to look after this.
Olivier Gutknecht has gotten his OS X application working quite well, too. Although it’s by no means a simple Finder interface like iDisk, it is drag and drop and reasonably intuitive. Uploading it quite fast, too. It’s not a sluggish application, and it does help you with things like passwords, storing them in the System Keychain.
For OS X users, Gutknecht’s S3 Browser is what makes this system work. I would expect him to standardise the interface in the future to something a little more iDisk-like. The S3 system does operate in a rather different way to iDisk, so it is quite understandable that the S3 Browser doesn’t have a perfect UI from the onset… but still, it’s something I’d hope for in a future release.
I imagine a really good UI would make this app very popular indeed.
Cheers to TUAW for the tip. Jungle Disk is another OS X (/Windows/Linux) app which does try to work within the Finder, although I couldn’t get it to work.
You’re raising a very valid point with S3 Browser user interface. For a Finder-like, iDisk interface, I think you nailed the problem: I prefer to have (for the moment) something that will feel somewhat geeky and not present an UI to the user that would set expectations without being able to fulfil them - as S3 has some inherent technical limitations which make a bit difficult to offer seamless experience.
One of my goal was to provide a “starting point” to experiment with S3 on the Mac, as an user or a developer, and if an application can be developed on this base to be a true backup solution with a rich UI, I’d love to see that. Maybe it could be S3 Browser itself… in some future version.