…doesn’t really seem to work as advertised. The story starts a few days ago when I realized that my free dropbox account was nearing its full capacity. I contemplated creating a few ghost accounts to get that extra gig or so of free space but figured that eventually I’d end up in the same situation once again. Considering how much I used the cloud storage I decided it may be time to finally put some money into a paid-for service.

Problem with dropbox’s paid service however, was that I was using only 2gb. It seemed like overkill to upgrade to a 50gb account for $10/month. I then remembered from a while back when I was first looking into cloud backup/sync software of one called Jungle Disk. It sounded great – uses Amazon S2 (as does dropbox) but with an open source client that gave you far more controla. Only reason I went with dropbox was because it was free and suited my needs at the time. So, it was time to give Jungle Disk another shot.

The sign up, payment and install processes went without a hitch. I decided to go with the “Jungle Disk Desktop” version, and hey turned out that with the base monthly fee they decided to include 5gb storage too – great! Payment was processed instantly and away I went!

On installing the program, it presents you with a wizard to help you set up your first ‘drive’. I figured I’d just enable all options and go from there – whether that’s a good thing or not I don’t know. To begin with, I wanted to sync my “My Dropbox” folder and if all goes well, I’d start with other folders too maybe – who knows? Yea, never got that far though. I set it to my drop box folder and let it sync over night. Waking up in the morning and expecting it to be complete I instead see several errors complaining it wasn’t able to upload one file or another and failed. It didn’t just skip the file (which from what I can tell, it’s supposed to!) but kept trying that same file over and over again until it finally gave up. So I figured, yea sure first time with the software – maybe it’s conflicting with dropbox already running in the background? So I gave that a close, and tried again. It got to the same file and stopped. No errors this time though (I was only able to check because of the logs I turned on from curiosity). Made changes to files? NEVER updated. I tried viewing what was saved on my disk via the virtual network drive – it only got bits of 2 main folders from about a dozen. Horrible!

Essentially, I’ve spent the last two days fighting with a horrible piece of software. It’s been constantly crashing on me whenever I try to make changes to configuration. And I’ve been making config changes trying to get it to sync successfully, if only just once! But every time it starts syncing, it gets to the same files and goes into an endless loop. Click cancel on the upload for that file? And it crashes! One of the files it was hanging up on was insignificant, so I decided to delete it but sure enough it finds another file to hang on.

I got frustrated to the point where I’ve decided to delete the virtual disk and try starting again. See where that leads me. If it -still- fails then I’ll contact support and see if the money I’m paying is worth it at all. If not, then I guess I’ll find something else. I’ve recently learned of another service called Mozy that seems to offer unlimited backup for around the same price as Jungle Disk’s base price but unlimited hosting of anything always makes me weary – more research would definitely be required. I’ve also been toying around with using Microsoft Mesh but the software is still a bit sluggish and doesn’t always sync properly. It also has no revision history which I’ve found can be VERY helpful!

Anyone else have any experience with Jungle Disk or other online backup/sync solutions? Any recommendations?

Possibly related posts:

  1. Jungle Disk – continued