Review: personal backups to Amazon S3

Summary/conclusion

When I started working on this review, I expected both products to offer similar functionality and backup/restore speeds, with the only differences being the user interface; after all, both CloudBerry and Jungle Disk are merely a simple front-end to a storage cloud. As it turns out, I was completely wrong; there are some major differences between the two.

Both products perform their most essential function well; backing up and restoring files and setting a backup schedule works fine. As I expected, Jungle Disk offers a more polished interface; it’s been on the market for years, and you can see that a lot of work has gone into small refinements such as the simple-yet-effective Activity Monitor. On the other hand, CloudBerry appears to be improving with every new beta, and offers an important feature: compression. Jungle Disk has this to say about compression:

One important consideration is that compression breaks the ability to do block-level updates (where we only upload the changed portion of the file). Because of how compression scrambles the file, block-level updates don’t tend to be possible.

Depending on how often you run your backups, in the long run block-level updates will save you far more money than compression.

Which appears to be untrue; several other products offer both compression and block-level updates. You can store and compress chunks of a file separately, or store checksums of file chunks and only upload a compressed form of the changed part(s) of the file. It’s not exactly rocket science… Their other argument is only valid in a number of cases. For most people, 99% of their data will never change after being uploaded; especially for personal backups. Just how often do you change your holiday pictures after saving them?

So at the end of the day, the choice is rather simple. If you have lots of very small files to upload, or have a single large file that has lots of small changes, you’ll want to choose Jungle Drive. If, on the other hand, you have mainly larger files that you want to upload fast, or you have files that tend to compress well, I’d like to recommend giving CloudBerry’s Online Backup a try. As long as the free beta version is available, it won’t cost you; and it can save you lots of money in the long run by reducing the total amount of storage you’ll use. The monthly savings alone might be worth spending the $29 on once the final version is released.

If you’re looking for other features, or want to use other cloud storage services, Jungle Drive is probably your best bet right now. It offers the ability to mount “cloud drives” so they can be used from other applications, making them appear to be a local drive. It also offers the option to use Cloud Files instead of Amazon S3; the costs for storage are the same as for S3, but for now Rackspace doesn’t charge you for data transfer to and from their service, which might save you a couple of dollars for your first backup. Both the local mounting of your backups and support for other cloud services are on the CloudBerry roadmap as well, but there is no specific schedule for these yet.

Jump to: [Intro] – [CloudBerry Online Backup] – [Jungle Drive] – [Summary/Conclusion]

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