Zonbu is really on to something organizing transparent online storage in partnership with the Amazon S3 storage cloud. They aren’t the only ones doing it however.
While not nearly as slick as the transparent integration that the Zonbu OS offers, ZManda, a commercial service, is now offering corporate users the ability to backup to S3, in addition to tape and optical media.
Will it be much longer before someone does a tool for Ubuntu and other popular distributions that allows the end user to create folders and entire backups directly to S3 from the desktop?
You can read more over at DownloadSquad.com: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/01/11/zmanda-offers-backup-to-amazons-s3/
Or on the ZManda website: http://www.zmanda.com/
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
Yeah, the on-line backup is great, but getting large numbers of files into it can be a pain. I decided to move over a couple of GB worth of my music files and froze my Zonbu. No surprises there I suppose, I’ve hit this wall before.
I am still unable to make a larger “disk” drive with a 16GB CF card following the instructions from Zonbu. I think the Zonbu folks need to make this easier.
…and the transparent approach doesn’t half slow down web browsing when it’s uploading the photos I’ve passed across from the camera. With JungleDisc, or the like, you do have to choose to backup — but you can also choose not to.
Can you switch the backup off temporarily? Has anyone successfully tried?
“Will it be much longer before someone does a tool for Ubuntu and other popular distributions that allows the end user to create folders and entire backups directly to S3 from the desktop?”
I think this is JungleDisk – http://www.jungledisk.com – though not quite a slick.
This is a Firefox S3 extension.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3247
I believe there is at least one other one.
I am not concerned much by a two hour outage, but some people will have reason to be http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gXxIIYYrfAQDvbRe5UofBF6PdEXAD8UR3U380