No More MozyPro – Now It’s Jungle Disk

I had a short love affair with MozyPro, the online backup service. While I was intrigued and excited about MozyPro at first, over time it gradually became clear that I was really only excited about the idea of MozyPro. I really want my vital files to be backed up online. Online backups are a great compliment to an external hard drive, and an essential part of the system I use to guarantee my clients data. However, MozyPro isn’t the system I hoped it was…

So now we’re breaking up. I’ve found someone else, someone who understands my online backup needs. Someone called Jungle Disk.

Here’s what I like about Jungle Disk vs MozyPro:

UPDATE May 2010: When I wrote this review about a year ago, JungleDisk was a small, cool little app that worked well. Now it’s a larger app that still works well, but it chews on 20-60 megs of RAM at any point in the day…which isn’t how it used to be. If the folks at JD are reading this, please comment below and let me know why you’ve abandoned the super-small memory footprint I remember. Also, if I’m an idiot and have it set incorrectly, let me know that too!

By the way, JD is still better than MozyPro despite this annoyance.

Original article continued…

• It’s fast. The little piece of software I downloaded was 4mb. When I installed and configured it, it took about 3 minutes. The same can not be said about MozyPro – the software is achingly slow during configuration. Setting up the original configuration on MozyPro took 10-15 minutes, most of which was time spent “What is taking so long?”

• It’s cheap. $2 a month for the software, plus $0.15 per GB of storage per month. MozyPro costs $5 a month for 1GB of storage, then $0.50 per GB after that. Yikes!

• It uses Amazon’s cloud server system for data storage. I’m a big fan of the concept, and Amazon is about as reputable as a company can get. They also have multiple servers worldwide, so it makes it easier for me to store and recover data during my travels.

• It works from multiple machines. One account for as many machines as you want! Awesome. I have two laptops, and I’ll be adding a desktop soon. These three all share the same files, now they can share the same backup account. MozyPro – not so much.

• No horror stories. With MozyPro, a quick search will reveal multiple stories of poor MozyPro customer service and lost backups. Lost backups! Maybe it’s just that Jungle Disk is new, but I couldn’t find any bad press.

• I can make my Jungle Disk backup drive “local.” Jungle Disk’s software allows you to map your backup drive as a networked drive, i.e. when I double click on “My Computer” I can copy and save files directly to my backup drive, as if it were a physical external drive.

• Jungle disk matches MozyPro’s encryption system. I’m no encryption expert, but you can set two levels of password protection, and you can encrypt data as it’s compressed. Sounds good enough for me.

• MozyPro’s account management system sucks. No offense to the talented people at MozyPro, but what the hell is the deal with the account management platform? It’s just about as confusing a system as I’ve ever seen. OH, by the way, you can’t cancel your MozyPro account without sending an email. WOW [sarcasm].

The only gripe I have with Jungle Disk – it’s not liking my intermittent Internet connection here in Costa Rica [Note - I'm no longer in Costa Rica and the software is even better]. Still, the MozyPro system had trouble with the connection here in Costa Rica too, so I don’t know that it’s much different.

The bottom line: MozyPro is expensive, slow, hard to manage, and the stories of lost backups are frightening. Jungle disk is fast, cheap, and backed by Amazon’s S3 cloud server network (which is as bullet-proof as you can get). All hail Jungle Disk.

P.S. Since this post has built up some link equity, I’m going to link to my Denver logo design service page.