I have been using Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk as a Client for the last couple of years. This is a great solution though the cost is pretty high if you compare it to just buying an external disk.

What is Amazon S3, and Jungle Disk
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. I use it to backup all my digital contents (music, photo, video). Amazon S3 does not offer any type of clients to typically access the service just a set of API’s. I first started out with implementing my own client but found out that writing my own client is just too geeky. I use Jungle Disk as a client to access my S3 account. This combination works perfect and I’m really happy with both S3 and Jungle Disk.

The problem with Content.IE5
I have not set up automatic backup but make a backup manually by copying folders from my network drive and over to my S3 account. Jungle Disk maps a drive to my Amazon S3 account for seamless integration. And here is where the problem or issue comes into action. What happens is that for each file that I copy from my local storage (read network drive) to my S3 area the file is temporarily stored at my local PC at:

C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5

This folder is actually a hidden one (system folder) and not easy accessible for non-tech persons. I found out about this because my local drive almost got out of free space. This hidden temporarily folder was eating up my local Gigabytes.

The solution to the problem with Content.IE5
The solution to this problem is of course to delete the directories and files that are stored in this temporarily directory. This can be done manually or you could write a batch file that is executed after you have backed up files. This is what I have done.

Another solution is looking more into what is causing the local storage (caching). The problem is that Jungle Disk is running in the environment of the Local Service user. The files will be stored until the Local Service user reaches the cache limit. Her is a nice thread describing some of this issues. The solution is to ensure a cache limit that is small (or not extremely large) so that the system will clean up nicely. If we look at the solution described in the thread it describes where to set this limit in the registry. Using regedit I checked what the CacheLimit on my PC was: 256 MB. This is way lower than the 15 GB I had to delete the first time I found out of the the Content.IE5 folder issue.

I do not think this solution will work. I think that the Local Service is running under some other user (WindowsNT user?). But this is just a wild guess. Another issue is that to change the registry for the Local Service all processes by that user must be shut down. This could be a bit tricky, but most of all, it’s time consuming trying to find out what will work or not.

So I still run a manual clean of the Content.IE5 folder…

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