In my search for a reliable and cheap (or free) provider of online backup services, I’ve moved from xdrive to idrive and now to Jungle Disk. The first two options were both free for my purposes but over time, I became suspicious of their reliability.
Jungle Disk is the first option I’ve tried which costs money to use. That being said, it is much cheaper than other backup services.
Jungle Disk uses Amazon’s S3 Storage service to store your data. So you are paying Amazon for your storage and transfer costs. These costs are very reasonable though: basically 15 cents per gb per month of storage.
The Jungle Disk software is free to try for 30 days after which you need to purchase it for $20. They also offer a “Plus” service at a cost of a dollar a month. This offers block level backups and web access to your files.
The software itself seems to be quite good. It offers similar backup options to the idrive software which I really liked. And it is available for windows, mac and linux.
Right now, I’m using the trial software but I expect I’ll purchase it and also upgrade to the Plus service since block level backups will save time and transfer costs in the long run.
[...] at Jungle Disk as a possible solution but disregarded it since it did not support Linux. Mike posted his thoughts about it and pointed out that they are giving some love to The [...]
Interesting! I’ll have to check that out. I was using mp3tunes.com to back up my mp3 collection, but I didn’t like the interface. I’ll give this one a try for backing up my other stuff.
Found a couple annoying things about JD out. First of all, it tries to bring my laptop out of hibernation to perform the backup. Since my laptop is password protected at boot, it just sits at some bios level login screen. It also will try to do the backup the next time the computer is on if it misses the backup rather than sticking to its schedule. This was an option in idrive and I really don’t like the way JD does these things. Hopefully both will be fixed in the upcoming version 2.
Anyone interested in JD should check out episode #123 of Security Now where they interview Dave Wright, the creator of JD.