Jungle Disk

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I installed Jungle Disk on my home PC last night to use for backing up my personal data. I've been using Mozy for the last year, and was pretty happy with it, but since I don't back up a ton of data, I think Jungle Disk will be slightly cheaper, and has a few unique features. I chose RackSpace as the location to store my data, though Amazon's S3 service is the default. They both charge 15 cents per GB per month to host your data, but S3 charges an additional bit for every GB you transfer in or out, and RackSpace doesn't charge that. I'm not sure why it defaults to S3, when RackSpace is cheaper, but it does.

I'm very curious about their "Enterprise" offering. The rate they're charging is very very low, but at the same time, they aren't EMC, they aren't Symantec, and I wonder how many enterprises are really ready to trust their data to Jungle Disk...

I'm using the Desktop edition, and I like that it lets you also mount your backup space as a drive, though I was a bit dismayed at first that I had to schedule a particular time to do my backups, as I tend to leave my PC asleep. Going through the options, I saw it had the ability to wake my PC from sleep, as well as perform my backups at the next time the machine was on, which is how I actually prefer to run it. I also liked that it let me throttle bandwidth usage during certain hours of the day, so that I can turn it loose from midnight to 6:00 a.m., but it won't eat up all my bandwidth when I'm likely to be using it. I do wish that it would let me configure separate settings based on days of the week though, I'd be fine with giving up all of my bandwidth during weekdays too, but not on weekends.

reCAPTCHA

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I've updated some of the software that drives this blog, so you can now post a comment without creating a username, as long as you solve the reCAPTCHA to post it. If you get one that you can't decipher, click the two arrows chasing each other to get a different one. If you're a registered user, you'll only have to solve one reCAPTCHA, at the time you register. I'd initially disabled un-registered comments to avoid spam, but was still getting registration spam. Hopefully, by using reCAPTCHA, both problems have now been solved!

That New Battery Smell

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I got a new battery for my 15" MacBook Pro today. My computer is nearly two years old, and I was sad to give up my beloved 12" PowerBook at the time I got it, but I really love it now. Sadly, I used it so much the battery was down to less than two hours on a charge, instead of the original 4+ hours. Today, with a shiny new battery in the laptop, I'm showing over four hours left as I type this... I see a lot of students in my cubicle who have batteries that won't even last 5 minutes, yet they want to blame the computer, as if it's defective. Sadly, that's not the case, if you buy a laptop and you use the battery daily, you need to be prepared to replace the battery after a couple of years. They're expensive, and paying that out can be painful, but everyone I convince to do it remarks how their computer is like new again.

In short, next time you buy a laptop, just make sure you take into account that you'll probably need to replace that battery after a couple years, and don't wait too long to do it, as a notebook you can't unplug is just a slow desktop...