As most of you know, I have been using and recommending JungleDisk as my backup service of choice. So far, I’ve been very pleased with its performance, features, and support. It makes recovering from disaster very easy. I can also use it for version tracking while working on things such as proposals, letters, etc. This is due to JungleDisk’s ability to keep changed versions (and deleted files) for a specified number of days.
Carbonite is recommended by quite a few people that are sponsored by the company. True enough, most of them offer disclaimers about the sponsorship, and I’m sure that they actually use the product. However, here is the problem.
Carbonite has planted positive reviews of its service on Amazon.com and other places. That is just not cool to do.
While their service may be ok – I would not fully trust a company that crosses that line. Advertising and endorsements are acceptable, but planting reviews is not. If they cross that line – then what other line might they cross – with your data.
Oh yeah – one of the reasons that I prefer JungleDisk is that at least part of their software is open sourced. Your data is actually encrypted client-side and stored with Amazon’s S3 service. Even if JungleDisk were to go out of business, you could still access your data on Amazon’s servers.
The same can’t be said of Carbonite.
http://ftothefourth.blogspot.com/2009/01/question-of-trust.html
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/carbonite-stacks-the-deck-on-amazon/
Thanks for posting this. I am a current reseller for Jungledisk and have a couple of things to run by you. Carbonite is eating my munch when it comes to some surface issues and I guess I am looking for some positive JD advice.
1. It has been brought up several times that the words JungleDisk is plastered everywhere within the reseller’s version of the software. Logs, reports, error messages but I havent seen any fixes yet.
2. Carbonite hits the customer at $4.95 per month, period! As a reseller, it’s hard to match that much less make anything on JD with $2 per month for the software, useage fees and then the S3 fees along with that. How can a reseller have any ROI?
What can a reseller do. I have over 10 clients on a trial basis but Im afraid to pull over any more until I have a solution to these issues. What are your thoughts?
Hi and thanks for the comments and questions!
I actually don’t use the reseller version of JD even though I was initially excited about it. For the vast majority of my clients, I create them a JD / Amazon account of their own and have the storage fees billed directly to them. My reasoning is simple: If something happens to me – then their backup service needs to continue uninterrupted.
On the reverse side, the initial post about the reseller edition worried me with a single Amazon account solution. That means that I would have to manage the billing for clients, etc, and I have several that are in the high-res imaging and video business with terabytes of storage. I decided that I did not want to be responsible for the billing.
How do I make money? I charge my normal hourly rate (or sometimes a flat fee) to set everything up for my clients. If my clients need to add additional files to their backup, then I get paid to set it up – and they are billed separately by Amazon/JD. I’m not really worried about marking up the per GB fees at all – too much hassle for my business model.
The vast majority of my clients don’t want to worry with the setup, even though both JD and Carbonite are pretty easy to setup. My clients want to worry about their core business. That’s why they hire me in the first place.
What about monitoring? With many of my clients, I also help manage their domains and email. I enable reporting in the JungleDisk client and setup a forwarding rule in my customers email system so that the reports are fowarded to me. I also take advantage of the RSS reporting using iGoogle’s reader to monitor them and/or Google Reader.
My clients trust me absolutely. Some have asked about Carbonite and I simply explain that JD and Amazon are a better solution due to the more open nature, which also makes them slightly more secure. I don’t trust a totally closed source solution in this case. Using the word “Amazon” also carries weight and trust – and I’ve had no issues with my clients agreeing with me.
I hope this gives you some insight and direction into how it works for me. I’ve been very fortunate with my business – I’m up 25% over 1 year ago and still gaining.
I use both but I’m just starting with carbonite pro. Carbonite has a courier service to overnight your data, its also essentially a fixed cost. Carbonite I believe will also backup to an external hard drive. For 1tb its about 100 bucks a month and you can run it on multiple computers. This means you can run it on a server for files and on laptops to get PST files if you aren’t using exchange. You can make money on either service, but teh real money is in billing the time to set it up and check it. Jungledisk is a good product BTW but I would never use it solely, its difficult to estimate the bill and easy to underbill the customer. One other note Carbonite has the mindshare, clients know the name.