rantotron

I’ve been using Mozy for my online backups for the past few months. I was mostly happy with it, with a few grievances. For one, sometimes the Windows service would halt and backups would stop, and I was given no indication that my backups weren’t running unless I went to check the status.

Second, the fact that the service kept needing restarting at all was a little irritating.

The nail in the coffin though, was reading about the restore process and having some negative experience with it. Being an online backup solution, I figured I could easily access my backed up data wherever I was.

Well, I sort of could… I wanted to grab a picture of Eleanor the other day while I was at work and figured I’d restore it to my work computer. Apparently what you’re supposed to do is log in and choose a file or files to restore, and ‘request’ a restore. Apparently it takes a while for the restore to happen and you get an email when it’s ready. I’m guessing this is because the files actually sit on a tape drive somewhere and a robot has to go retrieve them and restore them to a disk. It didn’t take that long for the one file (maybe 10 minutes) but it was a little annoying and left me wondering how long it would take to restore the 60gb I had restored with them.

I also did a bit of reading on the forums and saw people had a LOT of problems restoring after a crash. 2 or 3 GB would restore then just stop. Or it would take weeks to restore 50GB.

So, enter Jungledisk. The thing I really like about Jungledisk is it uses Amazone S3 as its storage location (or Rackspace if you want.) You pay Jungledisk about $3 a month for the service, and then whatever the Amazon storage/transfer costs are on top of this. (About 0.15 a GB). You can also set up a ‘sync’ folder that syncs to every computer Jungledisk is installed on (just like Dropbox but more storage for cheaper), and set up a network drive that uses Amazon as your storage space.

Amazon gives great uptime for their storage, so the restore process is basically only bottlenecked by your data transfer rate. All in all, this is probably going to cost me a little more than Mozy (with my storage costs about $12/month vs. $6 a month for Mozy) but the peace of mind of knowing my data is always available plus the other great features make it pretty worth it for me.