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Why Jungle Disk is so slow

I recently signed up for an account at Jungle disk, http://www.jungledisk.com.

I’m paranoid about backups, I use Time Machine to do a full weekly backup and Jungle Disk as an off-site backup solution. It seemed the cheapest option since you only pay for what you upload, and although I have a full 160GB hard drive, my sensitive files only total about 10 GB. At 0.18$/Month that’s 1,8$/Month + bandwidth.

Jungle Disk Uploads files to an Amazon S3 disk, in my case, located in Europe. I chose to pay 0.03$/Month + bandwith extra for that location because I thought latency would influence the speed of my backups, that’s why I went with Amazon over Rackspace. I’ll probably migrate anyway when Jungle Disk offers a migration tool for this.

I have access to an internet connection with a symmetric 100 Mbit link so I was surprised when I noticed jungle disk was only using about 40 KB/s. After thinking about it, it actually makes sense.

The reason for the slowness of the backup is due to several factors.

Jungle Disk Uploads Individual files, not a big compressed file containing all files to be backed up.

In practice, this means JD does not have a continuous stream of bytes to upload like with a big file, instead it has to stop sending information while preparing to send the next file (including encrypting, it see next item). Besides, it needs to setup the S3 file system to receive the new file. During this time, the TCP connection is almost stopped. When JD starts uploading the next file, the TCP connection already lost all it’s speed, that’s why the speed is only high when JD is uploading big files, the TCP connection has enough time to adjust and recognize the speed of the link.

Jungle Disk Encrypts the files using AES before sending it over the internet through a SSL connection. (UPDATE: This is wrong, see comments)

This means JD has to stop sending files until it finishes encrypting and entire file. This could be solved if JD could encrypt files at the same time it sends the previous file. This could reduce the time the TCP connection is stopped.

Uploading only differences is not really an improvement.

While it’s true that uploading only new files or changed files is a big improvement, uploading only the differences of the files themselves it’s not that big of an improvement. When you think about it, what files have you edited lately with small differences? Text files? So you only send 10 KB instead of 50KB? You gain 40KB? That’s nothing in today’s bandwidth speeds. When you edit a big file, like a big image, you most likely edited a big part of the file and you still have to upload most bytes of the file.

Jungle Disk is a really nice service, and I think it’s the best you can get. Probably there’s not  an off-site backup solution that isn’t slow. Besides, it’s only slow the first time, when you have to upload 10GB in one time, after that you only have to upload new or changed files, that’s about 1GB per backup in my case.

If you don’t have an off-site backup solution yet, Jungle Disk is the way to go. And you DO need an off-site backup solution, right?

Posted 25 June 2009 † simaom § apple § geek § ti ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Clean Macports

Here’s a nice post on how to clean up macports:

http://simenhag.blogspot.com/2008/11/cleaning-up-macports.html

I do this cleansing from time to time.

Posted 24 June 2009 † simaom § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

How to easily encrypt/decrypt files using GPG in Emacs

The latest emacs pretest version (23.0.95) includes  EasyPG making it easier to encrypt/decrypt files almost transparently.

You just have to C-x C-f a file and C-x C-s and EasyPG takes care of the rest for you.

Posted 24 June 2009 † simaom § emacs ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

How to fix Time Machine stopping

I had my Time Machine backup working and I used to do my backs every week or so.

After I ran out of space, I bought a new external to use as a backup volume, so I formatted the new hard drive using Disk Utility and set it to use the GUID partition scheme and HFS+.

I started time machine and it began a new backup but after some time the backup always stopped.

I retried several times, and I reformatted my external hdd multiple times, and several other solutions I found while googling but Time Machine always stopped during the backup.

I saw this knowledge base article from apple, where they advice users to use GUID, so I didn’t try anything else. Until I did, and it worked.

So my solution on how to fix Time Machine when it stops repeatedly during a backup is to use MBR and not GUID (as apple suggests). I think the SATA controller of my disk doesn’t like using GUID.

Posted 24 June 2009 † simaom § apple § geek ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Smultron regular expressions engine

Smultron has a nice advanced find and replace feature and it uses ICU as the regular expressions engine.

To help you building nice regular expressions for smultron, you can get more information about this engine at http://userguide.icu-project.org/strings/regexp

Posted 05 March 2009 † simaom § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Mac OS X Simple text editor

smultron

I usually use emacs for my normal tex(t)’ing/programming tasks, but I often make use of other simpler text editor to do simpler edits over text files. When using my Macbook, I use Smultron.

So far, I think Smultron is an excellent tool for my simple text editing needs.

Posted 13 February 2009 † simaom § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

GPG Keys

Another one for the geeks.

I’m preparing some posts about moleskines and pens, meanwhile, I’m writing this post about gpg keys.

Gpg keys is an extremely good solution to protect your privacy, here are some links you can use to know more about it.

http://www.gnupg.org/ http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html http://www.queen.clara.net/pgp/art3.html

You can use enigmail, with Mozilla Thunderbird, to integrate gpg capabilities to your e-mail client. (Really recommended)

Just search google if you need more info.

You can lookup my key on mit’s public keyserver, you can use it to verify every thing I wrote, was really wrote by me: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xFFF7D6FE

If you want to change some encrypted e-mail, just for fun (or not), you can use my public key to encrypt it, and send it to simao at bliter dot com. I’ll reply, and you’ll receive a encrypted message that you can decrypt with your private key. Of course you have to upload your public key to a keyserver, so I can encrypt e-mail to you.

Posted 14 June 2006 † simaom § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

goPod – iPod Volume Booster

If you have an iPod, this is for you.

European iPods (and some from other countries too) have a volume limiter that prevent you from blowing your hears out.

But I like to hear my music really loud, so I googled for a solution and I found euPod. After destroying my music library with it, I found out that I had to run euPod everytime I change my library. I had to restore my iPod, and I got some corrupted files I had to delete and rip from my CD library again, so I don’t recommend euPod. I then googled out for other solution.

I found goPod. Pretty and simple, just press a button and that’s it, not the euPod confusion.

I just have to run goPod every time I install a new firmware. Cool hum?

It’s available for windows, mac, and linux, and the source is also available =)

If you have an European iPod, you should definitely try it out.

Posted 10 March 2006 † simaom § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (2) °

The Pilot G-TEC-C4

What an amazing pen.

I’ve replaced my dear Uniball Signo 0.5 with this one.

Many thanks to the guys at PigPog for pointing me to this one.

I’ll talk more about this one when I write Part III of my quest for the right pen for Moleskines.

Posted 28 February 2006 † simaom § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (5) °