DISCLAIMER: I have been a Jungle Disk customer since 2008, and this is my story of watching their fall from fame. I have used Jungle Disk for years, and have been very satisfied with the pricing and the software up until recently. I became a Lifetime member of the Desktop Edition when it was offered for sale as soon as possible, and used it up until this week. However I have opted to leave the service for many KEY reasons.

• The software has NOT been updated in months, I can’t even remember when a news item was last posted for a release
• The blog has not been updated in months
• The development team has been NEAR silent. Back in 2011 I had opened a ticket noting that I was concerned by the lack of updates from the team. Support said they would request an update, but nothing came from that.
• There are some known security concerns with Jungle Disk at this time.
• At one point the blog was infected by spammers, this now marks the blog as phishing in OpenDNS and other popular prevention groups. OpenDNS prompts with the following screen if you try to visit their blog:

So basically because the development team has been very quiet with no news, the blog has stopped updating, and no new software releases to be seen all had me very concerned about my backup solution. Obviously, you want your cloud provider for backups and data to be actively and communicating with its users, not appearing to be dead in the water.

So instead of waiting for Jungle Disk to be exploited, or run the risk of having to migrate to a new backup system WHILE recovering from a possible Jungle Disk disaster, it was critical to find a new solution. I started researching where to go next. I found my solution and started my migration to Dropbox.

Dropbox is actively developed, has secure standards in place, is very fast, is available on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac), and is very slick. The dev team communicates with users very often, and the software is kept up to date. Thanks to fortunate timing, the Price of Dropbox recently moved down to 100 bucks a year for 100GB, or about 8.34 dollars a month. I was paying about this already with Jungle Disk and using under 100GB, so the move was clear.

Migration was a snap, I simply moved everything from local storage into Dropbox, and symlinked things as necessary (such as my iTunes library). This in turn removed the need for the Jungle Disk scheduled backups because Dropbox handles syncing changes right away and seamlessly too. On top of this, Dropbox auto revisions files for up to 30 days, or if you pay for a feature to keep all revisions forever. Overall, it only took about 2 to 3 days to migrate away from Jungle Disk to Dropbox, and remove all files from my Jungle Disk.

Dear Jungle Disk: I enjoyed your product since 2008, and even used it twice to safely recover from system and hardware disasters. However, your lack of communication, updates, and potentially a major security threat has forced me to move to another solution. Perhaps the day will come where things get straightened up and the development team shows backup, thus making my Lifetime subscription worth it again. Perhaps our ways will cross again, and I do hope the development team gets it together and we see Jungle Disk become a true competitor again.