Jungle Disk started life as a way to backup local files to Amazon’s S3 — I use it to backup the 300gb or so of personal data on my local system and it works great. The company behind the software was recently acquired by Rackspace so in its next release, Jungle Disk will add support for Rackspace Cloud Files,
Since Jungle Disk was started our plan has been to support multiple online storage providers and give users a choice of where they want to store their data. However until recently there haven’t been any viable alternatives to Amazon S3. We’re pleased to announce that in the next release of Jungle Disk (2.6), we’ll be adding support for Rackspace Cloud Files as an option alongside Amazon S3. Like Amazon S3, Cloud Files is a distributed, replicated, Internet-scale storage service. Rackspace is the world leader in hosting and operates data centers across the US as well as in Europe and Asia.
We’re also excited to announce the pricing for Cloud Files with Jungle Disk. Cloud Files storage will cost $0.15 per gigabyte per month with no additional charges for requests or bandwidth in either direction. You only pay for the storage you use. We expect that this simplified pricing along with Rackspace’s reputation for quality and service will make Cloud Files a great option for many users.
They’re quick to point out this means they’re supporting Cloud Files in addition to Amazon S3. In the comments section, one of the developers notes that with the upcoming release, users will be able to backup to both services simultaneously. At some point, however, Jungle Disk will support some sort of replication — backup to S3 or Cloud Files and then data gets replicated between the two without having to double bandwidth usage. Nice.
As for the pricing, it makes sense for Cloud Files to drop the bandwidth charges that Amazon S3 charges since, for most backup situations, the typical user isn’t going to have a lot of bandwidth usage after the initial upload. Making it cheap to get things stored and those monthly charges going is smart business. (S3, however, gets used for a lot of purposes beyond backup, so it might not make sense for them).