Author: Matt Walsh

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) service coupled with Jungle Disk is an excellent, inexpensive solution for on-line backup.

The Amazon service is $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and $0.10 per gigabyte transferred. It’s pay as you go, so you’re never paying for more storage or bandwidth than you need.

Jungle Disk is a very user friendly front end for the Amazon service. It creates a new network drive on your system that is your access to your storage. Use it just like it’s a local drive in any application. It also includes a customizable backup utility that will backup at a scheduled time and keep archived versions of changed files. Finally, it’s free to try and only $20 to buy it. The license is for every one of your computers, including a USB drive friendly version that you can run on any system without needing to install it.

Pandora is your own personalized internet radio station. Once you sign up, you start by telling Pandora about one artist that you like. It then uses data collected as part of the Music Genome Project to find other music you might like. It then begins playing music. As each song comes up you have the option to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Pandora then uses this feedback to refine your playlist. Even better, Pandora now supports several mobile phones. You can see if they support yours at here.