Jungledisk being canned - buggy and prone to errors and multiple failed backups

July 19th, 2008Backup Software, Personal

Its a common problem with all software developers: At first your software is simple and easy to use and as a direct result has few bugs.  As you add more features, you start to realize that every new feature or enhancement creates new bugs and problems.  For some software like games, utilities and the like, customers are probably quite forgiving when it doesn’t work.  But backup software is a whole different ball game: if backup software you develop doesn’t work as expected, you are going to have some pissed off customers.

Jungledisk is one of these unfortunately and truthfully I am quite sad to see it in this state.  The original idea was great: leverage the comparitively inexpensive Amazon S3 storage service to backup your computer data.   In theory, once you get past the kinks and idiosyncrasies of working with Amazon S3, it should be smooth sailing from that point on.

Nope, not with Jungledisk.  Just look at their support forums and count up all the unique forums topics: over 3000 unique topics and over 10,000 individual replies in their forum discussion areas related to problems alone!   Not a good sign for software that has been around only a few years!

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Forum activity isn’t the only indicator of problems.  A lack of Product design and Product strategy seems to have resulted in 3 versions of their software now an expensive addon service called MyJungleDisk.  Don’t be fooled by the $1 service add-on price either.  The additional transaction fees will kill you.  When I first started using Jungledisk my monthly costs were around $5.  I haven’t backed up that much more data, and its already up to $30 per month.

And finally, today, I had to make the inevitable decision: I am canning Jungledisk for good.  Its just too unreliable and buggy.  Not the kind of thing I want to see with my backup software. 

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Stay tuned for a future post about an alternative backup strategy.

Update: Dave Wright, CEO of Jungledisk has posted a comment here and I have replied on a new post which you can read by clicking here.


2 Responses to “Jungledisk being canned - buggy and prone to errors and multiple failed backups”

  1. JungleDave Says:
    July 20th, 2008 at 6:07 am

    Have you asked for support for any of the issues you are having? One of the reasons our support forums are so active is that when users do have questions we respond quickly and usually clear them up easily. Most “support forums” are ghost towns where people complain and nothing ever gets fixed.
    Regarding the issues you mentioned:
    1. Cost - if your backup size hasn’t gone up, it’s possible the extra space may be used by previous versions - the default settings keep all changes for 60 days, but you can adjust this to lessen the space needed.

    2. Multiple products - a company having multiple products to serve different markets is hardly an unusual strategy.

    3. Errors - the only two actually errors you mention are “time limit exceeded” - which simply indicates your daily backup took longer than the maximum time you set. It is continued at your next scheduled time - and “Snapshot failed” - which indicates an issue with the Windows Volume Shadow Copy service. This isn’t actually a Jungle Disk error, but a quick search of the forums will turn up several users who found solutions to this.

  2. Mayur Jobanputra » Blog Archive » A response to JungleDave and my Jungledisk bug complaint Says:
    July 20th, 2008 at 11:33 am

    [...] response to JungleDave and my Jungledisk bug complaint July 20th, 2008Backup Software Recently, I posted about my unsatisfactory experiences with Jungledisk and my decision to stop using it.  I was having troubles keeping my costs low and have had [...]

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