Does Jungle Disk Really Work?

Jungle Disk is a backup service that is a little different than others in that it uses Amazon’s cloud as well as its own proprietary storage system. With prices as low as $2 a month for personal use, and $4 a month for business use, a lot of people wonder if there’s a catch, or if it actually works as good as some of the higher-priced options out there. So we looked into this more to find out which backup service you should go with.

Overview
Backing up your important music, movies, pictures, documents, and other files is crucial these days on an individual level, but can be even more so for business. If you are banking on these files to make you money, and they suddenly get corrupted, or get deleted altogether, it could be financially disastrous. Luckily, more and more people are realizing the importance of backing up their data and not relying on storing it on hard drives and other physical storage devices. Flash drives can get lost, CDs and DVDs can get scratched or lost, and hard drives are known to just stop working all of a sudden.

The Claim
Jungle Disk claims that your files will be safe from you simply losing them, someone coming along and stealing them, viruses that attack your computer, and even acts of God. The say you’ll be able to sync up all of your work on your different devices and computers so that you can have all of your files at your fingertips no matter where you are. They also say you can access it from any computer that has a web browser and is connected to the Internet. These aren’t necessarily features that are exclusive to Jungle Disk, they’re basically describing the features of “the cloud”.

The Hype
There is a growing trend toward backing up your computer, or at least your most important files, and being able to access them everywhere. The term “the cloud” is gaining in popularity as more and more programs rely on storing data remotely and letting you access it whenever you want.

The Cost
Jungle Disk tries to compete on price by showing you a $2 a month starting point, and they give you the first 5 gigs of data storage for free. After that it’s just $.15 per gigabyte, and there are no limits to how many gigabytes you upload. To help compare that to other plans with 50GB and 100GB limits, that would be about $10 a month for 50 gigabytes, $17 a month for 100 gigabytes.

The Commitment
You aren’t locked in to any sort of contract, but this is where the importance of choosing the right backup service comes into play. After you get all of your files backed up with one provider, you really don’t want to go through the whole process again when you find out that they weren’t the best choice to go with. It can take a long time to get all of your files uploaded, so definitely keep doing your research until you are sure that you found the right one.

Evaluation
Since Jungle Disk uses Amazon S3 and Rackspace (they were acquired by Rackspace so no surprise there), they have a pretty secure and time-tested cloud service at their disposal. However, there has been some criticism as to how secure your files are when stored with their service, which makes us wonder just how reliable this really is. When you’re talking about backing up important files, it’s crucial that your backup method isn’t as vulnerable as your desktop.

It’s a very competitive industry, and there’s really no room for error when it comes to protecting people’s files. Because this is getting lousy reviews from those that have used it, we’re recommending going with one of their competitors that has a better track record of keeping data safe and secure, but also putting it at a price that is reasonable, and easy to understand.

Keep It Simple
The pricing structure here will drive you up the wall, and there’s just no need to complicate things so much. There are other services that do a great job of keeping things easy to understand, and not nickel and dime you for every little transfer of data. For example, Carbonite gives you an unlimited data plan for one set price so you don’t have to wonder what your monthly charges going to be, and you don’t have to ponder how big your files are, or how many files you add to your pewter as you go along.

Final Jungle Disk Review

There’s little doubt that Jungle Disk works to backup your files, but there are just too many drawbacks to using it, and enough controversy around it to make us say that it’s best avoided. There are plenty of other, more viable choices to go with such as Carbonite or SOS Online Backup.

Our Recommendation
We have found two backup services that we can recommend to you, depending on what you’re overall needs are. If you don’t want to fret about how much data you’re uploading, we recommend going with Carbonite. But if you are concerned about how long it is going to take for you to upload all of your files, we recommend going with SOS Online Backup. This is because SOS has been shown to be able to upload files twice as fast as Carbonite, but they have the drawback of having limits to the number of gigabytes you can upload in any given month.

What do you think? Does Jungle Disk work or not?