Tuesday, August 12, 2008

A Poor Man's Amazon S3 Storage


Amazon has a very useful online storage system called S3. Cucku allows you to turn your home computer or the computer of someone you know into a personal version of Amazon's S3. While I may not use this for high-value content, it certainly is an effective means for creating an off-site backup.

Cucku is not the first application to allow this type of work to be done. What I like about Cucku is that it's easy to use, secured, and includes built-in backups. There are plenty of secure connections -- VPNs -- and plenty of backup systems, but not many easy-to-use combinations of the two. With hard drive space being plentiful and home Internet access fast, Cucku makes a lot of sense for the cash-strapped school. Just make sure there is no policy about staff taking school data off-site before starting a backup routine.

Cucku is also a great solution for backing up laptops. One interesting point is that Cucku uses Skype for transferring files. That's a creative way to utilizes a dependable peer-to-peer network. It does mean, however, that you will need to have Skype installed. Unfortunately, Cucku only works on XP and Vista.

T

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

don't quite get how this works, but I'm using SMEStorage.com which is a front end to Amazon S3 and lets you use a rich web interface, iGoogle, Facebook or allows you Iphone access etc - woks great - not sure I'd want to set this up myself....

Anonymous said...

I have cucku - it's been fantastic. I just followed the on screen instructions to install; it introduced me to skype too. I have my laptop backed up to my PC & vice versa. It took away all the worries about losing end of year reports and assessment data. All my pics & music are safe too. BRILLIANT!!

Thane said...

Thanks, Karen. I'm glad to hear that it works as advertised. This is a great solution with some who has extra disk space connected to the Internet.

T

Thane said...

I've not tried SMEStorage. I have Jungle Disk -- it does what you described -- and I like it. Of course, one never really knows about how good something is until disaster strikes and one gets back all the lost data.

T