Jottacloud - how it is?

Since it is unlimited with price similar to google drive i would like to ask about experience:
How fast i uploading, downloading and how good is streaming when rclone is used to mount jottacloud drive?

https://www.jottacloud.com/en/

how reliable is this new company?
Wont they disappear after few months with all files?

I have not used it with rclone, but it’s a norwegian company, it has been around since ~2008. So it’s not new at all, especially not when we’re talking tech.

Looks (much) better and the (web) interface is more responsive than ACD or hubic.
You won’t be able to upload anymore with rclone unless you get this fix: https://github.com/ncw/rclone/pull/2466

I don’t give them a lot of time on this plan, especially if it gets any popular. It just takes enough people to get over the pain threshold wherever that is (around 10TB I guess). They might try to throttle the heavy uploaders but people will continue and data will accumulate week after week until they don’t want you as a customer anymore.

The beauty with rclone is that you can test it [jottacloud or anything] easily and I’m not talking about the 5-10$ nominal fee but that you don’t need to learn or invent a completely new thing or workflow or redesign your network to make some product fit and still have a lot of things not done as you like it or at all (yes, Backlaze Dektop, I’m looking at you). Just make a remote, use the command lines you already have for some other remote product and that’s it.

topic about 10tb limit:

There are a few posts on Reddit about Jottacloud, I think I’ve seen one on plex forums as well. However nothing really fresh or conclusive (especially that they played in the meantime with the 10TB limit). Also rclone works only since recently so they didn’t have time to react to people bringing loads and loads of files there.

Only time will tell but it annoys me this crazy marketing - clearly there is some point where they don’t want you as customer anymore. So put a limit there and get rid of all the customers that can cost you money. What is the trouble there, will the other customers be scared too? Will somebody who wants to store 2TB not come to a service advertised as 10 TB but will come to one advertised as unlimited? Or will they feel obliged to fill all 10TBs while if you leave it unlimited (which we all know means unspecified actually) they’ll just be happy to take 2TBs?

One thing to note, at least for me when copying from a Scaleway VPS the transfer speed is caped at 15 MBit/s per upload. If I ran more than one transfer at the time I saturated the 100 MBit/s connection of the VPS.

That’s not nice but okay for me as I have only 12 MBit/s upload at home :wink:

I haven’t tested download yet.

I recently decided to give it a try and there are a few things I like and a few I don’t.

Pros:

  • I live very close to Norway and I like knowing that my data live there instead of scattered around random data centers.
  • I like the CLI interface for simple backups. I use Arq and Duply to back up my computers to NAS and then point the jotta backup client at the directory on the NAS
  • Rclone works great with it after the recent patches
  • I like the division into backup / sync / archive tranches
  • Decent pricing even if “unlimited” is really capped at 10TB

Cons:

  • Each upload is capped at 15 Mbps, which is a problem for large files, especially because the backup client doesn’t appear to do incremental backups
  • The only two-factor authentication available appears to be SMS
  • Enabling two-factor authentication appears to make it impossible to use rclone or their own CLI client
  • Customer support appears to be limited to a blog and a skeletal FAQ, hence the “apparently” above

In a nutshell, it works well for me as an offsite backup of backups, but I really do not like the lack of robust TFA.

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Small note, the download also seems to be capped. I recently needed to download a big file >30GB on a PC with a 1GBit connection and I did not get over 20 MBit/s. After I used a download manager on the same machine and downloaded the file with 20 parallel connections I got around 320MBit/s.

I can confirm that the download speed seems to be limited. Using rclone copy to download a file from Jottacloud to local (on a 1Gbit connection) gives me around 13.5 MB/s while downloading the same file from Google Drive gives me 25-30 MB/s. For what it’s worth, I am also geographically much closer to Jottacloud than Google.

Does the limited download speed have an effect on streaming performance, if i want to use the mounted jottacloud on a Plex server?
@olihey: You used parallel connections with a download manager, but rclone hasn’t an option for this? Is there any way to enhance the up-/download speed with rclone itself?

Background:
I’m searching for a huge and less than $10/m cloud storage, suitable for mounting via rclone at my VPS (and using for Plex media server). I’m not sure what to pick: One Drive Personal Family (5TB shared) or Jottacloud 10TB

There is a trick to get a single file to download in multiple stream. You have to create a public link, open the web page for that link, start the download for file, copy the actual download URL and use this in any download manager that can download a URL in multiple streams.

That way I could download a 4K video of 30+GB with 40MB/s on a 1 GBit/s line. But it’s cumbersome.

Bottom line, Jottacloud downloads are capped at 25 MBit/s, meaning stream high-bitrate movies is probably not an option. It’s good for backup though.

Allright, thx for quick response. I’ll choose something else…

I’m in Norway, and I do not experience any bandwidth limit per connection on Jotta. I would say that it is more likely to be a limitation in transit somewhere between you and Jotta over the internett, and not something Jotta is enforcing.

I just grabbed a random file now to test:
2018/09/23 01:19:00 INFO :
Transferred: 558.332M / 1.466 GBytes, 37%, 97.540 MBits/s, ETA 9s
Errors: 0
Checks: 0 / 0, -
Transferred: 0 / 1, 0%
Elapsed time: 45.7s
Transferring:

  •      RandomTestFile: 37% /1.466G, 112.721M/s, 1m6s

Why would you want to choose anything other than G Suite for Business with unlimited storage on Google Drive for $10/€8/£6.60 per month? The alleged 1TB limit for less than 5 users is not in the T&Cs & has never been enforced.

@nigelbb Jottacloud offers the same unlimited service for €7.5/month, without the minimum 5 user limit. It could also be beneficial to keep your library synchronized across multiple cloud storage providers.

Jottacloud has also performed faster in my case, playback/seeking in Plex is usually twice as long when using GD as a backend. This is likely due to my geographical location, though.

@sjurtf Interesting. I literally can’t get above 15MB/s upload or download with Jottacloud on my 1Gbps connection. I’ll try from a different system in case it’s something wrong with my server.

Can I ask which ISP you have?

The alleged 1TB limit for less than 5 users is not in the T&Cs & has never been enforced.

That’s right, but you never know about the future. Normally there is no free lunch after the companys aim is reached (Google’s G Suite growth). In the past Microsoft stopped their unlimited service because of too massive usage, Amazon too. Someday it’ll maybe Google’s turn.

However, 5TB is enough for me, so I’ve chosen Office 365 Personal. 8,33€/month is not that bad and I also don’t have to care about Office licenses anymore.

I have Get, and I’m actually using GetSky (Jottacloud whitelabel)

So there is quite a chance that Jottacloud is handling your connections different because you come from a network that has a contract with Jotta. As I said, if I am doing multiple transfers to Jottacloud on a 1 GBit/s connection I have fast speed (>300MBit/s) but a single transfer does not get over 15MBit/s up and around 25 MBit/s down.

Do any of you wrap your Jottacloud remote in a cache remote, or do you not bother? Does Jotta care about API hits the same way Google does?

Also, it appears poll-interval is not supported by Jottacloud remote? So uploading/modifying files on the remote indirectly (i.e. with rclone move as opposed to writing directly to the mount) will result in you not seeing the changes on the mount before dir-cache-time expires, am I right?

I think Jottacloud does much better API-wise. I don’t mount anything, just sync some local folders with my “normal” digicam/phone pictures (which are quite a lot as I started taking them a long time ago and I don’t slow down…). With Gdrive every now and then it would throw an API error when uploading (I’m talking just adding a couple hundred pics, with 4 threads and I don’t have a particularly fast connection). Also just sync (when there is nothing to sync) will take forever if left on default; with --size-only would take less but still probably 1h+ (it would be faster than the default because I presume rclone doesn’t need to list the times on the remote) ! With Jotta I don’t have any such problem. There were some errors over the other (not the last weekend) but I presume just temporary issues; plus I need every now and then to edit a filename as it doesn’t accept more than 255 (I think) characters or so. They are nice as another option beside gsuite but I wouldn’t count on them surviving if Google nukes their unlimited.