I’ve talked in the past about how important offsite backups are. They can be your lifeblood in the event of hardware failure or even a fire in your home. Regardless of the disaster, you should be backing up with an online backup service.

For the last year I’ve used Mozy’s Home service which provided “unlimited” data backups for a flat fee each month. $4.95 or $50 paid annually. I didn’t have any issues with Mozy’s service, but configuring the backup sets using the client was terrible. I don’t know if I just had too much data or what, but it was so cumbersome that I never bothered to change my backup set after the initial configuration.

With my anniversary on the horizon I decided to shop around and see if there was a suitable alternative to Mozy. One of the reasons I had considered moving was I was tossing around the idea of running Windows Server 2008 at home which disqualifies me for use of the Mozy Home service and requires me to use Mozy Pro at a significant price increase. Carbonite was the obvious alternative, but there was something minor that kept Carbonite from being the one. I can’t recall what it was at the present time.

A coworker asked if I had considered using Jungle Disk in conjunction with Cloud Files. The pricing model here is drastically different as you pay $2/month to use the Jungle Disk software and then you pay $.15/GB of data stored for the month. With between 20 and 30GB of files backed up, this could represent an increase in cost each month, but the price can fluctuate if I want it to. Likewise, the Jungle Disk client is AWESOME and it allows my remote data store to be mounted as a network drive ON MULTIPLE COMPUTERS. This allows me to share files across all my computers if I want to.

You can also use Jungle Disk with Amazon’s S3 data storage, but you incur additional costs since Amazon charges for storage as well as bandwidth. Just to clarify, Cloud Files is Rackspace’s competition to the S3 service. I’ve not used S3 so I’m not going to compare those individual services, but I know that the additional cost was going to add up as I backup my files daily.

If you aren’t backing up your data, and we both know that you should be, head on over to the Jungle Disk website and set yourself up an account. You’ll register and then install the software to complete the setup. Be sure to choose Cloud Files as your storage method.