Apple Briefs

The Apple Blog reviewed Jungle Disk 2 today. Jungle Disk is an online backup system built on top of the Amazon S3 Storage Service. It’s quite similar to Mozy, which I previously reviewed, and serves much the same purpose.

I haven’t had a chance to try Jungle Disk, but one difference jumps out at me. Mozy charges a flat fee of $0.50 / GB per month (assuming you need more space than their free 2GB MozyHome account. Jungle Disk, on the other hand, charges only $0.15 / GB per month. The catch is that Jungle Disk also charges $0.10 / GB of data uploaded and $0.17 / GB of data downloaded.

If you upload only 3GB per month for each GB stored on Jungle Disk, you will come out ahead of Mozy. My Mozy backups are usually pretty small, but sometimes they spike up to 50-100MB (I have the free Mozy Home account and so I only backup a small part of my system). People with large static files or databases (e.g. Daylite databases, video files) that change frequently will probably be better off with Mozy. Others might find Jungle Disk cheaper. I’ll have to do some number crunching to see which way this one will play out for my system.