Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Bucket Explore versus Jungledisk

Sorry Jungledisk fans, but I have to say that although it was only $20, it was $20 too much.

Bucket Explorer is a far superior product. Sure it cost twice as much, but it's worth it. I bought Jungledisk first because a friend recommended it, but wish I had tried Bucket Explorer first. Bucket Explorer is just easier to use, and has features I like. Creating and deleting buckets is a breeze. It's just a pain in Jungledisk. Bucket Explorer makes permissions a snap, and even offers easy linking to files. These easy to use public URLs and time-limited signed URLs are a nice touch. Perhaps it's minor, but Jungledisk's long bucket names such as 334HNDX984NXN49F8N-webbucket just aren't as nice as the simplicity of Bucket Explorer letting me create something nice and smple like "webbucket". Bucket Explorer (like Jungledisk) works in Linux. Anyone that has read enough of my past posts may realize I love using Linux, and Bucket Explorer is simply great on my KDE based distro (Mint Linux). It was easy to istall too. I also realy don't like the idea that Jungledisk stores my data in their own format. Good luck accessing files uploaded by Jungledisk with any other client software.

So what do I loose by deciding against Jungledisk? I realize that Jungledisk provided a backup feature. Well, I can use S3Backup if I need it, and it's free. Go ahead and check that link out, and have a look at S3 Webmaster while you're there, it's pretty cool too. Jungledisk does have Jungledisk-USB. With this I could carry around a working copy of Jungledisk on a USB key and access S3 from any USB supported computer. Okay, I can't find an alternative for this, but frankly, I wouldn't miss it. Jungledisk is$20 for life and that apparently includes updates. Sadly these included updates don't include the newly added Jungledisk-Plus features. BucketExplorer will only provide free upgrades for 6 months. I hope they reconsider this.
So what have I learned? I should have done more research before buying any S3 application.

By the way, you might want to skip both Jungledisk and Bucket Explorer and simply rely on the S3Fox addon for Firefox and find that you'll be entirely happy with that. It's pretty damn useful.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for writing about Bucket Explorer. We have made a lot of progress since your posted this a year ago. Now Bucket Explorer has a backup feature (Bucket Commander, which can be scheduled like robocoy or rsync).

Bucket Explorer had USB support from day1. You just need Java installed on every target machine where you use Bucket Explorer, or use the embedded JRE, which we provide in Bucket Explorer ZIP version. Its available on the downlaod page.

Saurabh
http://www.bucketexplorer.com/