Item — HN Reader

Because the JungleDisk solution is clunky. You're either going to use Dropbox if you're a casual user or use a Linux filesystem in user space to interface to S3. JungleDisk is the purgatory no one wants to be in.

Note: I've used JungleDisk; my business partner still uses JungleDisk and complains about its shortcomings; I tell him to switch to Dropbox.

1 comments

I've used jungledisk for a long time and felt they've really squandered a great opportunity (or maybe getting acquired by rackspace _was_ the opportunity in the first place).

I agree the jungledisk UX could be better, but the idea was good: run an service on the user PC that works with s3 and behaves like a hard-drive and make the user pay amazon directly for the storage and bandwidth "a-la carte." There really isn't a need for servers, why not just s3 buckets + the user machines?

I am surprised there aren't opensource solutions that just take s3 keys and make a virtual drive. Or are there?

There are solutions such that you describe, but they're FUSE filesystems for Linux, not full blown GUIs for OS X and Windows.

JungleDisk uses the server functionality for maintaing state.