Is it practical to use JungleDisk as a music library?

My hard drives have crashed too many times for me to want to continue keeping my music library at home, so I want to put it on JungleDisk. I have an account, I have the mp3s, but in terms of bandwidth is that practical?

I don't see myself listening to it all the time so I don't think the bandwidth fees would be that bad. I'm just having a little trouble trying to calculate the bandwidth and I find JungleDisk's pricing scheme a little confusing. Am I charged for both bandwidth and requests?

Can anyone shed some light on this?

7777

Posted 2009-08-30T01:06:00.860

Reputation: 229

Oops I wanted to tag this question with "mp3s" and "jungledisk" but I couldn't yet, too new. – 7777 – 2009-08-30T01:06:37.067

Answers

My hard drives have crashed too many times for me to want to continue keeping my music library at home...

That's why you use Amazon S3 & Jungledisk. With Jungledisk, your media files are backed up to the cloud and you can listen to them from the local copy. If the disk crashes, replace it and recover from the cloud.

Amazon charges you to upload, download, and store. So, it will cost you to initially upload them (currently $0.100 per GB), it will cost you to store them (currently $0.150 per GB per month), and it will cost you to download them (currently $0.170 per GB). There are volume discounts, but only when the volumes get really huge. They do also charge for requests, but those charges are pretty negligible.

If you don't keep local copies, and always pull your music files from the cloud, you'll have to pay to listen to every song, every time. Doesn't make much sense to me.

raven

Posted 2009-08-30T01:06:00.860

Reputation: 5 135

Thanks I think this is the answer I was looking for. I agree with everyone that I need to keep backing up my music files, but I think it would be safer if I kept the backups offsite, and bandwidth charges seem to be low enough for me to do that. And I suspected it might be a tad impractical to be charged to listen to a song every time so thanks for confirming that :-) – 7777 – 2009-08-30T18:20:15.640

My recommendation is to buy two matching USB external hard drives. Keep your music files on one and backup them up regularly on the second. I don't think the "disk in a cloud" solutions would be particularly helpful for regularly accessed files.

EmmEff

Posted 2009-08-30T01:06:00.860

Reputation: 1 277

I don't think it's practical to use S3/JungleDisk as a music library because the bandwidth will likely be just too low to be useful. You are also charged for both bandwidth (reads and writes) and requests, which could very well get expensive. Ultimately, an external RAID setup seems like a far more practical, fast, and accessible solution to your situation. It may even end up being cheaper in the long run. If you wanted to, you could have JungleDisk function, instead, as an offsite backup for your music, which would cost less (because it would use less bandwidth).

jgottula

Posted 2009-08-30T01:06:00.860

Reputation: 246

Any problems with bandwidth would be on the OP's side. JungleDisk uses Amazon's S3 to store all the files. – Josh Hunt – 2009-08-30T03:38:48.550

Have you considered using Lala? They have a music mover that will enable you to stream all of your music from their site for free.

I don't think you can download the mp3's from them (just stream them), so this won't work for a complete backup solution. Might work as part of your backup solution though...

Barrett

Posted 2009-08-30T01:06:00.860

Reputation: 196

Hey that's incredible actually, I'll be able to listen to at work and such, and I was thinking about asking for service recommendations another time. +1 Thanks! – 7777 – 2009-08-31T19:12:22.617