Today via LifeHacker, we noticed that Dropbox has added iPad support to their cloud storage system. The iPad’s been out for two weeks or so and already Dropbox is getting in front of that market – one that’s already selling faster than the ubiquitous iPhone.
Stitch Media uses JungleDisk for cloud storage – it’s the other major player in this space right now and it’s link to Amazon S3 was a major selling feature – completely scalable data storage with a reputable, redundant system. We’ve got over a terabyte in the cloud now and its been an amazing help for working with two offices in two cities. We’d be the poster child for JungleDisk if it weren’t for the fact that Dropbox seems to be sneaking around in our office.
When we were choosing cloud options, JungleDisk had just been acquired by Rackspace and dropped their pricing aggressively. They introduced limited permissions for multiple accounts and seemed to be making a play for cornering this market. They were the obvious choice as Dropbox was a little startup with no reputation and pricing plans that seemed geared towards personal use and not enterprise users. Since that time, we’ve consistently watched Dropbox steal Jungledisk’s spotlight with the following features:
- Ability to share single files with a user outside the secure storage system (the ‘killer app’ that we use it for)
- iPhone app (well before JungleDisk launched theirs)
- Mobile-friendly web access for Blackberrys and Android (still a little slow on this one)
- iPad app (well ahead of the curve)
- Social networking (Dropbox’s team actually communicates with the public to let you know what’s coming up)
Now if you look at that list – it’s not dramatic. Dropbox still hasn’t jumped on the one thing we require – unlimited storage – but it strikes us that both of these companies are within spitting distance of each other for ‘feature dominance’. Once both are offering the exact same feature list, I suppose the market will look to reliability as the benchmark. The frustration is the waiting game – Dropbox seems to be ahead in their usability and features (the ‘front end’) while JungleDisk seems to be ahead in scalable infrastructure (the ‘back end’). We’re not in a position to switch back and forth on a whim – over the holidays we did a local backup which took over a week to finish. We’re satisfied customers at the moment, but each time Dropbox goes and dazzles with a new feature that our team would really love to see in JungleDisk, we get a little closer to wondering if that one week download might be worth the hassle.
It’s not called innovation if it’s something your customers expect to happen. It’s called inevitable.
cfxcreative
February 10, 2011 at 5:50 am
I signed up with Jungle Disk (aka Rackspace) recently and I’ve found the setup to be really cumbersome and, frankly, confusing. I’m an advanced user and if it’s this difficult for ME to get my head around, I feel for the novice user who has little computer savvy.
Essentially, my intention was to use a cloud storage provider to help keep my laptop and desktop machines synced, so I could access the most updated files from each machine.
Jungle Disk has three components, which seem almost redundant in some ways – Network Drive, Backup and Sync. After nearly 2 hours on live chat with their support, I finally got my head around the difference between Backup and Sync and how, if I’m using Sync (essentially real-time backup of files as they’re changed), I don’t really need to enable Backup (backup of multiple files at a frequency configured in the app).
Dropbox is starting to look pretty good for its sheer simplicity. Put it in the Dropbox folder and whatever’s in there gets synced to your other machines. Done.
Did you end up switching in the end?
ATechGuy
August 16, 2011 at 9:25 am
Sorry, but I wonder about your savvy if the difference between backup and sync isn’t obvious.
Not everyone needs “sync to multiple computers”. If StichMedia were using mutliple offices that wanted to use a common shared file system, then something like DropBox, or Jungle Disk (in sync mode) would be useful. Sometimes you just want to avoid having to deal with a local server, or at least a server that you have to manage. In the sync model, especially the one where EVERYTHING must sync, such as box.net and dropbox, it starts to break when you have more than 10K files or a REALLY LARGE amount of storage consumed, such as 100GB or greater. Having a system where you can control which folders you want to cache locally and which ones you want to store ONLY in the cloud is a necessity.
If you’re a one-man shop, or just personally have multiple computers you work on from various locations, using the box.net/dropbox model is ideal.
If you’re shopping for a company to store your files in the cloud but don’t see every employee needing to cache (eg. sync) ALL the files from the company, (but still want to provide VISIBILITY to those files when needed, and visible from explorer, or finder) then systems like Jungle disk become more viable.