Yesterday I posted about my Jungle Disk issue which was making it so that my Jungle Disk was no longer a central repository but was instead serving as an external hard drive. Within minutes, someone from Jungle Disk contacted me and told me that my issues was a resolvable one. Since it wasn’t completely straight forward for me, I’ll include here, how to configure your Jungle Disk so that it serves as a central repository.

Jungle Disk Drive Mapping

Create New Backup

The first step of the process is to configure a new backup for your data. For this example I’m going to show how to sync your documents folder between and a P.C. The P.C. is already configured and now you are trying to map your Mac documents to your P.C. documents. Below is the screenshot for configuring a new backup:

Select Backup Sources

The second step in creating your mapping is to select the folders that you would like to map to the P.C. version of your backup. This is pretty easy, simply click the button shown in the screenshot below. You will have needed to configure your bucket on Amazon S3 already but I’ll assume that you know how to do that since you already figured out how to do that on your P.C. It’s pretty straightforward when you first install the application.

Folder Selection & Advanced Options

The next step is also pretty quick. Simply select the folders you would like to sync. Theoretically you could do multiple sub-folders but I figured that it would be easier to select a single parent directory that will map to the same directory on my Jungle Disk. Once you select the folder(s) click on “View Advanced Settings”.

Map the Folders

This part is pretty easy. In this step, you are selecting where you would like the folders from the previous step to sync on your Jungle Disk. For my backup I used the folder /backups/NICKLAPTOP/C/Documents and Settings/Nick/My Documents which mapped to my Mac directory /Users/nick/Documents. That’s it! Now you have added your Mac to your repository.

Fixing the Mail Issue

Now that I’ve figured out how to have this serve as a central repository, I am now back to being portable. The one thing that I haven’t completely resolved yet is mail. After watching The Learning Channel series on the start-up “Earth Class Mail“, I decided to check it out and try for myself. I’m sure it works great but I quickly realized that there is still one flaw in this system: all my credit cards require my real billing address.

That means that my credit report has my real address no matter where I’d like to receive mail. All my junk mail (which is essentially a waste of trees) still comes to these addresses. So there is a solution still: mail forwarding. I could have all the mail being forwarded to my D.C. apartment directly to my Earth Class Mail address in New York.

The only problem is that if I need any of the mail that gets forwarded to New York, I am creating a relatively inefficient process which isn’t the most environmentally friendly. Unfortunately for this, there is not a one-step solution to creating a central mail repository similar to my digital data repository. While you can set up forwarding, the process is not the most efficient.

Have you configured any mail forwarding systems that work for you? What do you do about junk mail? This part of becoming a digital nomad will be the most challenging.