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I’m a big fan of doing offsite backups. So much so that I compared a number of offsite backup services a long time ago. But backup solutions that require user intervention is a recipe for disaster. Personally, I’ve tried to automate as much as possible. I’ve set up a RAIDed storage server in my house (for the geeks, it’s RAID 1 with 2 live disks and 1 hot spare, each drive is 250GB) that gets the backups from the other machines in the house (everything executes automatically on a set schedule).

As I mentioned in my post on backup services, I was a fan of Mozy. I still think Mozy is a pretty good solution (more on why below) but having support only for Windows and Macs, it isn’t a complete solution. So I started looking at JungleDisk.

The Background

JungleDisk was started by Dave Wright who is an Atlanta based entrepreneur. Dave was previously one of the co-founders of GameSpy which was then bought by IGN where he was then Chief Architect. Dave started JungleDisk as a side project in 2006 after Amazon announced it’s S3 service. By creating an application that easily allows users to access and backup their files to the Amazon storage cloud, Dave had a hit on his hands. He continued working on the product and released a commercial version in August 2007. He announced pricing at $20 for free lifetime upgrades and support and use on any platform - Widows, Mac, or Linux. Oh yeah, you can use your licensed software on as many machines as you want too. Users pay for usage of the Amazon storage cloud (pricing here) directly to Amazon. This fabulous pricing structure was met with user complaints. Why? Because users thought Dave wasn’t charging enough and wouldn’t be able to build a sustainable business with this model. When was the last time you heard users complain that you were charging too little?!?

The Technology

Now for the geek stuff. The one interesting aspect of JungleDisk is that Dave releases clients for all three platforms simultaneously. When was the last time you saw a startup do that? Normally when you see people do that, it’s software written in Java. Personally, I hate full blown applications that are Java based. Sure they are fairly speedy with current interpreters but still, they’re interpreted instead of being fully compiled code. I’m a performance freak and I love my compiled code (don’t get me wrong, interpreted languages do have their place and I dig Ruby). Dave has taken the approach of doing fully compiled code across all three platforms. He does this by writing in everything in C++ and maintaining as much of the code base as possible as common through the platforms (I’d assume everything but some network interface stuff and some filesystem work). He uses wxWidgets to maintain a cross-platform GUI and then some open source libraries like libcurl and openssl.

The Competition

With my previously favorite program, Mozy, I could backup my Windows machines but not the Linux server that houses my RAIDed drives. So I still use Mozy since they give you some free space (if you signup for Mozy using this link, you’ll get an extra 256 MB of free space [so will I] for a total of 2.2 gigs free). It costs $5/month per computer to get unlimited storage on Mozy. Compare this to the flexibility of JungleDisk and the cost I’m paying per month to Amazon (less than $5/month for about 26 gigs of storage plus daily backups across four machines - no per machine cost), JungleDisk is overall a better deal. I still use Mozy for random secondary backup purposes (I mean, come on - it’s free!).

Also note, Mozy raised about $2m in venture capital and was recently acquired by EMC for over $70m. Another JungleDisk competitor, Carbonite, has recently raised $15m to bring their lifetime total to $21m in venture capital. Over all the competitors, I think JungleDisk is not only a better solution but a more cost effective and flexible solution.

The Future

JungleDisk is an absolutely phenomenal story. The company has been completely bootstrapped by Dave and now has significant revenue to continue its growth path. In fact, Dave just announced that he’s hiring. If you think you’re a hot shot C++ developer, C#/ASP.NET developer, or product manager in Atlanta, drop a note to Dave and let him know you heard about it through this blog. This is an absolutely phenomenal ground floor opportunity for someone looking for an entrepreneurial experience.

Note, Dave has released JungleDisk Plus which gets him into a recurring revenue stream and provides users with a way to do block updates of incrementally changing files. Given the length of this post, I’ll discuss this service in a future post so I can fully delve into the technical bits.

Disclosure

I paid for my copy of JungleDisk on August 12, 2007 (9 days after it went for sale). This was before I know that Dave and JungleDisk were Atlanta based.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot.  I didn’t include a link to the actual company’s site.  Sorry about that.