Picklewagon

I have officially found a backup service I am happy with. I have tried other services in the past but wasn’t completely happy with them for one reason or another. After hearing about JungleDisk from various sources, I decided to give it a try. I’m pretty happy with it so far.

I have been using it for about two weeks. I’ve installed it on 3 computers-1 Vista, 1 XP, and a Mac. It was really easy to do on each one. I can access my backed up files from each computer using the Jungle Disk client, through each OSs file browser, or any of the many other methods because it is using Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Solution) web service.

My Backup Requirements

After hearing many stories of people losing data such as images because of a hard drive going bad, I have thought what I would like a backup service to do. It’s inevitable. Your hard drive will go bad. It could be tomorrow. Or in three years. It sucks when it happens.

Everything, at least for me, is going digital. All of my family’s pictures are digital. All of our music is digital. Although in some cases I have physical copies (CDs) I don’t want to spend time to do it again. Soon I will have all of our movies converted as well. It would be horrible to lose this data. Lots of time, money, and memories gone.

A lot of data is being moved to the cloud. I don’t use a word processor any more. If I want to create a document or a spreadsheet, I do it in Google Docs. This is great for some things and bad for other reasons. But I feel very confident that I am not going to lose my data.

In the past, I have had multiple computers or hard drives and have stored backups that way. This saved me a few times. But what if your house were flooded or burnt down without you having the chance to rescue your backup. Personally, I’d be worrying about other things besides my backup in situations like this.

It is absolutely necessary that you have a backup in a different physical location.

What I Like About Jungle Disk

One of the reasons why I chose Jungle Disk is the pricing model. I pay a one-time fee ($20) for the software and then pay for what I use for bandwidth and disk space from Amazon. Free upgrades and pretty cheap

I can install the software on as many computers as I want. It runs on all OSs (at least the ones I use). The software is really easy to use. I specify which files and/or folders to backup. I can create scheduled times to perform the backups. I love the configuration options. You can add encryption. It can be used by my mom (hopefully) but is geeky enough for me.

Another great thing is that you can access your backups through your file browser. In Windows that would be Windows Explorer. If you want to backup a file, just copy it over. Again, this makes it really easy.

Oh ya. You can also restore your data if you need to.

Now I’ll get to the part I really like. It is built using Amazon S3. I can do whatever I want with the data once it is backed up. The possibilities are endless. I’m working on a few side projects to take advantage of this.

What Does JungleDisk Lack?

In a word, nothing. It is a wonderful piece of software. It was made to backup your data and that is what it does a good job at.

I highly recommend this software. I’m fairly confident that you have data that you need backed up. It’s about time you do it.