Comparing Jungle Disk to Other Online Storage Services
If you're in the market for online storage or backup you've probably noticed there are a lot of services out there. Jungle Disk has a unique approach to online storage that a lot of people like. This page highlights some of the unique benefits of Jungle Disk that you're unlikely to find with other services.
Jungle Disk is more than just backup
Most online backup services can only be used for basic backup. You select the files you want to backup and if you need to restore, you use their proprietary software or web page to select the files to restore, often waiting several minutes or hours before you can access your files.
Jungle Disk has a great automatic backup system, and can easily be used for basic data backup, but Jungle Disk also gives you a complete network drive that you can use from multiple machines - like an unlimited size USB drive that you can connect to from anywhere. The exclusive caching features in Jungle Disk make it so that using your network drive is as fast as a local drive, and you don't need to constantly transfer data from the server.
This also allows you to use your favorite 3rd party backup tool such as ChronoSync, SyncBack, or rsync to manage your data if you prefer - something no other online backup service offers.
No restrictions on what or how much you backup
Other online backup services place restrictions on what type of files you can backup or how much data you can backup in a period of time. In some cases you may not be able to backup your program files, large media, or system files. Even services that offer "unlimited" backup typically have restrictions on "reasonable" usage or reserve the right to terminate your service at any time with no reason. With Jungle Disk, your storage truly is unlimited. Amazon S3's unique pay-as-you-go model ensures that you can never outgrow the service or become a burden. While "Unlimited" for a flat price may sound nice, how long can a company afford to provide a service that costs more than they are charging?
Pay only for what you use, with no minimums
Most online storage is sold on a tiered basis, where you buy a fixed amount of storage (say, 10GB), even if you aren't using it all. Once you exceed your tier you need to move up to the next, often at a significant increase in price. This works great for the online storage companies - they know that no one has exactly 10GB of files to store, so while you may compare a cost per gigabyte based on the total capacity, in reality you're probably paying much more for all your unused space.
Amazon S3 is different. You only pay for the exact storage you use with no "minimum" tier and no wasted space. S3 already has some of the best pricing available at only 15ยข per GB, but only paying for what you use saves you even more.
One price, no matter how many computers you have
A single Jungle Disk license can be used across an unlimited number of computers with a single Amazon S3 account. Other online backup services make you pay monthly for each computer you want to backup, even if you're only backing up a small number of files from each computer. With Amazon S3 you only pay for the actual storage you're using across all of the machines running Jungle Disk.
Use Jungle Disk for backup, archival, or both
The backup features offered by many popular services will only backup data on your local drives, and if you delete the data they will remove it from your backup automatically (typically after 30-60 days). This means that you can't archive your files to the service to free up local space. Got a bunch of old movies you'd like to keep but are filling your drive? Or a directory with old documents you'd like to clean up, but keep copies just in case? With Jungle Disk you can safely archive your data and have access to it anytime you need it in the future.
Jungle Disk supports Mac, Windows, and Linux - and has from day 1
The Jungle Disk software is cross platform, which is important even if you only use one operating system today. Your data may live online for years, and it's important that you be able to access it from any future platform as well. You'll also find that the Mac and Linux versions are not "second class citizens", as with other backup services. We support the same feature set across all three versions and release upgrades simultaneously. We've even done additional work to ensure that platform specific features such as resource forks and finder data work like you'd expect.
Your data is YOUR data
Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 is the only online storage service where the application is de-coupled from the storage and you "own" your own data. When you use Jungle Disk, your files are stored on Amazon.com's servers using S3, an open web-service based API. They never touch our servers, and we have no idea what (or how much) data you are storing. Access to your data on S3 is restricted at all times by your AWS Secret Key which is never sent to us or any other user. You can choose a custom encryption key so that all of your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, and stays encrypted while stored. To further re-enforce the idea that you are in control of your data, we have made available open source code that can be used to browse and download your data without even using Jungle Disk.
This alone is something you won't find from any other online backup provider. Jungle Disk's unique model means that the software and service will keep functioning, even if Jungle Disk, Inc. were to go away.
We're small, but Amazon is big
Last but certainly not least, Jungle Disk's unique model helps keep our overhead low. We don't need to buy thousands of servers with terabytes of disk space, then hire all the people to run them - Amazon has already done that. Instead, we can focus on making the best possible software and offering great support. We're privately funded and were profitable in our first year of operation. Amazon is large, public, and profitable too. How many other online backup companies can say that?
At the end of the day, who can you trust with your data?
