Jungle Disk have just released the first public beta build of their online back up solution, which is powered by Amazon S3.
The add-in came second in Microsoft’s Code2Fame competition, and pricing starts at $0.15 per gigabyte transferred in either direction.
Jungle Disk for Windows Home Server is a Windows Home Server add-in that lets you back up your Home Server securely to Amazon.com’s S3 ™ Storage Service.
- Back up an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
- No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
- Your data is fully encrypted at all times with a personal, private key
- Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
- Restore files directly from the Windows Home Server Console
- Access backed up files from any Windows, Mac, or Linux PC
December 1st, 2007 at 1:27 am
Got my copy. Installed perfect and ready for backup. It allows you to backup your folders, but not your individual home computer backups. Good place to store those thousands of digital photos without worry they will get deleted or lost. Thanks for the info Terry!
December 1st, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Media posts, and those from the author originally, have focussed on the storage cost of .15 per megabyte. In addition to this, according to the current link above, is a TRANSFER (upload or download) cost of .10 to .18 per megabyte)
This is a significant piece of the cost structure and worth mentioning up front, I believe. Even now, the examples on the site talk only about the storage charge, and not about the cost including transfer charges.
As an example–suppose you wish to “protect” 100 megabytes of data, which grows incrementally to 150 megabytes over a years time. Something then fails, and you need to pull the full 150 megabytes back. What is the total cost of that protection? It is not as simple as .15/megabyte.
December 1st, 2007 at 4:35 pm
I was also curious like Bill about the transfer costs. I’m still confused, but here’s what my charges were for the first upload last night. I uploaded 848.1MB which appeared to take about 5-1/2 hours. Here’s what Amazon S3 is reporting:
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in 0.828 GB - $0.08
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out 0.000 GB - $0.01
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests 2549 Requests - $0.03
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests 1573 Requests - $0.01
Total cost so far $0.13
I’m not sure why all the PUT and GET requests? From what I can gather it costs $0.18/GB to get your data back once you save it on S3.
December 1st, 2007 at 9:03 pm
I don’t like the pricing structure of JungleDisk. I’d much rather pay a monthly set fee, and know what the charges were upfront. I currently use Carbonite, and am happy with the service, but unfortunately they have no plans to release a WHS version.
I may look at Keepvault once my Carbonite subscription expires. I haven’t used them before, but they offer a WHS version at a single yearly fee.
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm
While the Amazon.com pricing is more complex than flat-rate services, they price it that way because it reflects their actual costs. Rather than give you a flat rate with a bunch of limitations of what or how much you can back up, they just set a price and let you upload as much as you’d like.
Regarding the transfer costs - we tend to focus on the monthly storage fee, as that will make up the bulk of your total costs over time versus the one time transfer fees. For example, say you back up 15GB and restore it 5 years later. Your transfer cost would be $4.20, but that’s only 3% of what you paid during that time in monthly storage fees. We obviously do put the full pricing breakdown on our site so folks can understand what to expect.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
I have a couple of comments that I’ve noticed in the last day or two. First, it appears that Amazon still charges you for transfers even if there is an error and the transfer is not complete. One of my video files that is 1.3GB in size did not complete the transfer. JungleDisk showed a (400) Error Code: Request timeout after running for several hours. The next night JungleDisk was successful transferring the file for a total of 4.38GB of files stored so far. Amazon, however, is billing me for 6.012GB data transfer in. I know it is a petty small amount, but shouldn’t the service only bill for successful data transfer in?
The other comment is that I’m confused on how to actually “see” what’s backed up. There’s no file manager or anything like that. I see the “restore” button, but how do I know what files are actually on the Amazon disk?