Remote Backup: Jungle Disk, Mozy, Syncplicity and Carbonite
I’ve been searching for the perfect remote backup tool for awhile now, but today I decided to try them all, or at least the ones that I’ve considered using. I have automatic backups locally in case of hard drive failure, but I’m just too lazy to burn DVDs or getting an external drive to take off site. Today was the day I was going to find a solution.
Carbonite
Before I started, I thought Carbonite was the solution for me, but for me it was the least appealing. This is really designed for home users that don’t want to worry about the details, just backup all my stuff. The interface is missing a tree structure, so it wasn’t easy to select a directory and unselect sub-directories. It does the job, but doesn’t have a lot of options.
Mozy
Mozy offered something similar to Carbonite, but it has more control over the backup process. It was a little bit harder to use, but definitely more powerful than Carbonite. They also offer a 2 gig backup for free, which is nice if you only want to backup a small amount of data. Overall, Mozy was the second best backup tool I tried.
Syncplicity
Syncplicity isn’t really a backup tool, but more of a way to sync files online and between computers. I think this has a lot of promise and would be great for small offices or if you work with people in different locations. You can easily sync folders between all the computers.
You can access the files through a very nice web interface, but I had problems deleting files which I didn’t want sync’d. It also was always syncing, there was no way to schedule the sync. This means when you open up a huge Photoshop file and hit save it starts backing up even though you may keep making revisions.
Jungle Disk
Jungle Disk was the solution I settled on. It has the most flexibility, yet a very clean and easy to use interface. It also uses Amazon S3 (or Rackspace) to store the data, which I trust more than the other solutions. It offered the best options for encryption, scheduling, revisions, settings to auto-delete old files, email reports and web access. It is also the only solution that works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
You do pay per GB, but for less than 25 GB, it’s cheaper than the other solutions.
Don’t make the user fix the problem
I was going through updating my profile at SEOMoz and I realized I had an old profile picture. First off, you can’t just update it, you have to check Delete, press Save, press Edit Profie and THEN you can select a new one.
Below the choose file button there is this message:
Please try and upload a photo with square proportions. Rectangular photos will be stretched.
REALLY? I don’t expect you to do the cool Facebook thing where you can crop and resize on the fly, but at least just handle this nicely so I dont need to edit it on my end. You can crop it to be square on the center if it has to be square or you can just resize things proportionally.
I realize you think your audience is smart, but you’re being lazy. Rand Fishkin please fix this!
Laziness will not get you through a recision
I’m amazed at the number of small businesses that ask me how to improve their business, then complain that it’s too much work. If you don’t have money to throw at the problem or aren’t willing to dedicate time, how do you expect to succeed?
Just showing up is not good enough anymore.