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.