Saturday, November 12, 2011

Jungledisk review: a rambling piece of junk

So, I've definitively switched over from Jungledisk to SpiderOak - I can't say the latter is a well-written backup application, but at least it works.

In order to justify the definition of "Rambling piece of junk", here is the overview both of the problems encountered and the lack of professionalism in the development.

Application problems:
- The dialog for choosing what to backup is broken for Natty. In addition to being broken, once it's opened, it will make the JD interface unusable until the next restart.
- Syncing of files with accented characters is broken.
- Syncing of directories with accented characters is broken.
- Because of a bug in the syncing, under some, not rare, conditions, JD will delete files in the sync folders.
- Big files can't be shared, because connection errors will cause the upload to fail. Note that this function works perfectly in Dropbox.
- Internet connection detection doesn't work well. Sometimes JD doesn't detect it (even if the connection works perfectly), so that the program can't be used (for a short time).
- Sometimes JD doesn't connect to the service, so that the program can't be used.
- I can't copy a specific file (video, ~600M) to the remote folder.

Development:
- Until version 3.16, the option 'Backup as soon as possible when backup time is missed' didn't work; this is a core option for backup applications.
- In the timespan between the releases 3.14 and 3.16, which lasted several months, the only things done have been:
- introducing a release with a very serious issue (3.15), which has been been retired after a short time
- "fixing 5 bugs" (none of the above, which still stand) and "addressing two issues".
- At the date of today (November 2011), it's still 6 months that no updates have been released after version 3.16.

You can judge by yourself.