This week I made a change to an application that I use on a daily basis. I thought I would talk about the reasons I made that change and why it was a good change for me to give my readers some insights to the though processes I have when I look at changing online services I like.
For a long time I have used an online backup service called Carbonite. The service is very reasonably priced at $55.00 USD per year.The service runs in the background and is very silent. Their are not a lot of popup for the end user to deal with once the service is setup and ready to go. Carbonite has actually bailed me out of two file issues that could have caused lots of data loss. One was a major hard drive crash a year ago and I lost no data.
Personally I feel Carbonite is still a great service. I have my mom’s business running Carbonite on 3 machines and she is very happy with the service. One thing that is great about the service is you have not connected to the backup server in a week, an email is generated to remind the end user that their backup is out of date. What a good service.
The problem I have with Carbonite is I have expanded my IT network at home and it no longer fits into my needs. Carbonite only support Mac and Windows Machines. To go even further Carbonite does not support external drives on these operating systems. These two issues have caused me to reevaluate what I use and why.
Enter into the picture Amazon’s Jungle Disk Product. Jungle Disk has a little more flexibility, supports Mac, Linux and Windows and external drives in all of the operating systems. As a result I have moved my entire home network backup to Jungle Disk as of last week.
Jungle Disk’s cost structure is a little different then Carbonite’s. Jungle Disk charges a monthly fee of $2.00 USD for use of the service. Thy then bill you $0.15 USD per every Gigabyte of data which you store on their server. This is a small price to pay for insurance in case of data loss.
The software is a little harder to setup but not much. Total setup time was 10 minutes per machine from the time I downloaded the software to the time I selected all the data to be backed up.
The one thing I like with Jungle Disk is I can manage all my computers with one login. I can access the drive on Jungle Disk’s server like I access any network drive on any of my computers. This makes the service much easier to use once installed.
In summary I still feel Carbonite is a great cloud backup service and I would highly recommend it to anyone. For more flexibility or someone needing a Linux Backup, Jungle Disk is the service to use.
