Cloud Tools: Jungle Disk Backup and Recovery

by Sergey Bushik and Katherine VasilegaMarch 17, 2012

Explore the benefits of Jungle Disk, the challanges related to its use, and where it can be employed.

This post will focus on the opportunities provided by deploying Jungle Disk Backup and Recovery in a typical enterprise environment, as well as on the challenges related to this.

Jungle Disk is an online backup and recovery tool that stores data on Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. The use of Jungle Disk can improve security and prevent data loss, protect user files against loss, theft, viruses, and natural disasters.

Table of Contents

Jungle Disk pros, cons, and recommended use

Pros

One of the advantages of Jungle Disk is its high availability provided by multiple servers across the world. The solution is extremely flexible, since this software is available for both Windows and Mac OS, having the same functionality across both platforms. It is worth to mention the software’s single license that allows a user to install and employ it on all of her/his computers at no additional charge.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the Jungle Disk installation process and further setup. Once the Jungle Disk Simply Backup software is installed, the first step will be to enter Jungle Disk account credentials into the software. After logging in with credentials, you will need to create an online disk where all of your data will be stored. During the next step, the user will configure the automatic backup functionality.

The server-grade automatic backup feature allows users to easily backup their critical data to the cloud in a set‐it-and-forget‐it fashion.

Jungle Disk has solid security concerns to backing up and storing user files, so far as it encrypts user data with AES-256 encryption—a government and industry standard that is one of the most well-studied and most secure encryption algorithms available. Jungle Disk uses a unique key for each file and constructs the key using an HMAC file that helps to protect against certain attacks. You will learn about the master key that is based on a password you choose, known only to you and not stored with Jungle Disk.

Cons

One of the main drawbacks of Jungle Disk—and this is also true for all backup products and services developed to operate in a cloud environment—is that the choice of cloud providers to be used is commonly limited to only a few providers. As a result, this can be unacceptable for software solutions already hosted on a different cloud platform.

Recommended use

Jungle Disk can be attractive for small businesses that are not able to afford massive backup solutions. It is primarily designed for users who want to easily backup their critical files for protection or restore data that is lost or corrupted.

Sergey Bushik is an accomplished software engineer with 12+ years of experience in designing and building secure, scalable, and highly performant solutions. He has vast experience in creating multi-tier and multi-layered applications. In addition, Sergey can boast of a solid background in web development. He is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect, a frequent speaker and participant of international conferences dedicated to big data, as well as an author of several NoSQL\NewSQL benchmarks.