bruceb news

Previously:
Jungle Disk Online Backups
Jungle Disk File Syncing

Jungle Disk has two more levels of service for businesses: the Workgroup Edition, $4/user per month for teams of 2-100 people; and the Server Edition, $5/server per month.

Small businesses might find a lot to like about the Workgroup Edition. Instead of a single login name and password, this version of the program lets each person have a separate login name and password and separate settings for access to synced files and folders.

Imagine that you’ve got employees in three locations.

• Each person can use the Jungle Disk software to back up their computers.
• Everyone has a J: drive that is always up to date – if someone adds a file in Santa Rosa, the people in San Rafael and Oakland can access it right away.
• The Santa Rosa and San Rafael offices share a synced folder, and San Rafael and Oakland share a separate synced folder.
• The files are available on the notebooks taken on business trips, and at home for the partners who can’t leave work behind.

Again, this is the same functionality that is available from other products – notably Live Mesh and Dropbox, which are free. It requires installation and configuration of the Jungle Disk software. There are charges for storage over 5Gb in addition to the monthly subscription cost per person. You would choose Jungle Disk for file syncing if you were also using it for backups, not the other way around.

The Server Edition is designed for businesses with multiple servers, adding remote management of the program on all of the servers from remote locations. It’s not strictly necessary for a single server, since the Desktop Edition is also compatible with Windows Server 2003 and 2008. It’s worth noting that this is not designed to back up running databases, Exchange servers, SQL servers and databases, and it does not create an image-based backup that can be used for rebuilding a server after a catastrophic crash.

Jungle Disk has a very nice product line, polished and easy to use. I’ll be talking to many of my clients about this in the next few months. Review your backup plan and let me know if you want to move some files online!