Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

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Tag Archives: Jungledisk

Online Backup – Jungledisk

online-backupOne part of your roaming backup strategy should include offsite/Internet based backup services. The one I use is Jungledisk which has recently updated its software to version 2.5b. Jungledisk makes use of the Amazon S3 storage service as a destination (and soon to be Rackspace after its acquisition by them).jungledisk

When I upgraded I found that my main NAS storage was not being backed up, showing zero files present and a message saying that the username and password was incorrect/not present. Before the upgrade it all worked well, and after the upgrade nothing was doing for the network share based locations.

The problem was simple and related to a new feature introduced in this version of Jungledisk – the ability to backup without being logged in. Jungledisk runs as a service to provide this feature, and it does so using its own credentials which did not have access to the NAS drive. The solution is to change the logon credentials of the new JungleDiskService to an account that actually has both access to the local machine (for the local file storage backups) and to the network share from which you are also backing up. Changing the credentials of a service in Windows is well documented on the internet, so I will not go into it here.

After the change (and an exit and restart of the client), backups continued in their normal effective way.

A major lesson learned here also is… make sure that you test the software upgrade first when it is software that your business depends on.

Laptop or Smartphone

This one is the biggie – as a mobile worker, a long distance remote worker, what is the main technology you need to do your job? Do you believe you need your hulking 15″ or 17″ Laptop that weighs 3kgs (6.5lbs)? Is that really a portable solution? Or are you the newly born iPhone convert who only needs that few small inches of screen and 6 hours of battery life? Which is it? Nick Wingfield at the Wall Street Journal has just written an interesting set of thoughts that at the headline level, imply that we all should be the iPhone convert by now.

However I believe that the choices as to which technology is best, is down to exactly what you have to do and where you have to do it. In fact for the generalist like myself, I see a continuum of devices as being needed for the mobile worker with a very important cornerstone at the centre – decent and effective data synchronisation. This is not fully the cloud world view – oh no, I see the need for the cloud to be part of a complete solution that ends up with data spread from device to device, over the cloud and in the cloud – pretty much of a whole atmosphere approach.

Right now I have been experimenting with Microsoft Live Mesh as that cornerstone, combined with hosted Microsoft Exchange, Activesync, Evernote, Box.net, Logmein and JungleDisk. Some of these are more mature than others (Exchange and Activesync – although I have to be very Microsoft based from a device perspective), some are more small business than enterprise (Logmein/JungleDisk), and some are really flaky – Live Mesh. Right now (let us leave Mesh out of it for now), I have a very effective ecosystem for tech use combining two Netbooks, four other laptops, two mobile smartphones and three separate working locations – to the extent that I can (and have) suffer individual device failures and gone straight back to work – an important characteristic for an independent consultant like myself.

Now back to Live Mesh, this has showed promise and sort of does work but suffers from a failure to sync certain folders for no apparent reason, something I have shared with Paul Thurrott of winsupersite.com. I have stuck with it though, and not returned to Microsoft’s Foldershare or gone to competitors as yet although that is getting close.

So what sort of user do you believe you are? Smartphone or Laptop or somewhere in between, or somewhere else?