Jungle Disk Blog

Please join us Monday, February 15, 2010 for a Startup Tweetup hosted by Jungle Disk and Rackspace’s building43 featuring Internet and Social Media evangelist, Robert Scoble.

As a kickoff to a week of exciting startup activities, including Startup Riot and building43 interviews on-site at the Jungle Disk office with Jungle Disk, Clearleap, MailChimp, Skribit, and RentWiki, the Startup Tweetup is designed to bring entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts, bloggers, vloggers and (okay, we’ll even take a few joggers) together.

So get your @ on and join us for a night of interesting conversation and socializing…and a chance to win some cool prizes!

The details:

• When: Monday, February 15, 2010, 6:30 pm
• Where: Cypress Street Pint and Plate, 817 W Peachtree Street, Atlanta GA

Want to give us a heads up that you’re coming?  We would appreciate it greatly! Click here to RSVP!

I have been asking “how can I help those in Haiti?” after the country was rocked on January 12th by a series of earthquakes measuring 6.5 to 7.3 on the Richter scale.  The epic stories of loss and the unexpected moments of hope coupled with jarring images of those in pain has certainly awakened the desire of each employee at Jungle Disk to help those in need.  Many of you wanting to help may have found your own way to contribute, but I wanted to let you know about a collective effort called Hosting for Haiti.

Hosting for Haiti is put together by 11 leading and highly competitive hosting companies, including our parent company Rackspace, to facilitate donations to the Red Cross International Response and Haiti Relief and Development Fund.   The donations will assist in sending supplies, financial resources or even bringing relief workers to Haiti which we are seeing daily are all in short supply.  We know that there is no organization better suited than the Red Cross to ensure that 100% of the funds donated get to the Haitians in need.

There are three ways you can contribute or help:  1) donate and 100% of your donation goes to American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development fund; 2) Spread the word by sharing this URL w/ your friends, family or colleagues via email or your blog; and 3) Utilize your social media channels like Twitter or Facebook to share the URL.

You can also follow the progress of this effort on Twitter by following the hashtag #hostingforhaiti or @hostingforhaiti.

Great things really can happen when we unite toward a common goal.

I’d like to wish a happy holiday season and a bountiful New Year to all our Jungle Disk customers and partners. I hope your season has been filled with an abundance of friends, family, and food!

It’s been more than a year now since the Rackspace acquisition of Jungle Disk, and I’m extremely proud of the progress that we’ve made since then. The team has more than tripled in size and continues to expand. We’ve released several major product updates and two entirely new products, and Jungle Disk is now available through Rackspace Email & Apps to the entire range of Rackspace customers. My role has changed over the past year as well as I’ve transferred responsibility for engineering and business operations to others at Jungle Disk and started exploring the other divisions of Rackspace.

Working with the Rackspace Cloud group, I’ve gained exposure to some of the unique challenges faced by large scale cloud operators like Rackspace, challenges that will be encountered by many hosting providers and large enterprises going forward as more and more IT services move to cloud architectures. The technologist in me is excited about the groundbreaking technology required to solve these challenges, while the entrepreneur in me sees a big opportunity to make both public and private clouds faster, more reliable, and easier to manage.  And so it is that I leave Jungle Disk in capable hands to pursue my next venture.

I’m grateful for the amazing support of Jungle Disk’s customers over the years, and more than anything I’m proud of the community that has been built around the software. The future of Jungle Disk is bright and you’ll be hearing more about those plans soon. As for me, I am and will always remain @jungledave.

We have exciting news and savings for our Amazon S3 customers that we’d like to pass along.  On Dec 8, Amazon Web Services announced that Inbound Data Transfer will be free of charge until June 30^th, 2010 to make it easier for customers to get their data in to AWS.  All other applicable charges will still apply, but you will no longer have to pay the $0.10 per GB upload data transfer fee.

Additionally, Amazon S3 EU (Ireland) storage pricing has been reduced 15% to $0.15 per GB.  They are also reducing Request prices from $0.012 to $0.010 per 10,000 GET requests or 1,000 PUT requests.

These pricing changes will be reflected in your next statement.  Enjoy this early holiday gift from AWS!

As 2009 winds to a close, we’re happy to release another set of improvements and bug fixes to all four Jungle Disk Editions. Many thanks go to our excellent user base for sharing their experiences and suggestions with us.

The complete set of changes can be found in the release notes, and we’ve turned on automatic updates for Mac and Windows users. Linux users (and those who prefer to update manually) can visit our downloads page. Note that we didn’t release 3.03 for general availability, so most of you will upgrade from 3.02 to 3.04.

All of us at Jungle Disk want to wish all of you a warm and happy holiday season, and a joyous New Year. We look forward to meeting your cloud storage needs for many years to come!

Jungle Allan

Today we’re releasing Version 3.02 for all four editions of Jungle Disk.  This release contains a number of performance and usability enhancements, plus fixes for several issues reported by our users since 3.01 went out.

One notable enhancement is our new “Usage Information” screen for Backup Vaults (see the screenshot below).  Several of you have asked for additional details on what comprises your backup vaults, and we’re happy to oblige.  You can run this report on your own vaults by clicking the link at the bottom of the Backup Vault configuration page.

You can download the new version of your edition from our Download Center — we plan to enable automatic updates early next week. Once we do, Windows and Mac users can upgrade to the new version by selecting “Check for Updates” from Jungle Disk’s Help Menu.

Jungle Disk's Backup Vault Usage Screen

A minor update for all of our products is now available. Jungle Disk 3.01 fixes several issues that were found since the initial release of 3.00. We normally would wait a bit longer before releasing a minor update, however we wanted to make sure these fixes were available before enabling automatic updates.

You can download the new version from our Download Center. The release notes for each product are linked from the download page. We’ve enabled automatic updates, so you should also be able to update on Windows/Mac by selecting Check for Updates from the Help menu.

Also, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve taken the new Jungle Disk web interface out of beta. Jungle Disk Desktop and Workgroup users can now access the new interface via https://www.myjungledisk.com. Workgroup users can also use their workgroup domain, although it is no longer required.

Today is the biggest launch in Jungle Disk history! We’re officially launching two new products and major updates for our two current products, as well as an entirely new website and logo. Here’s what’s new:

• Jungle Disk Desktop Edition 3.0: A major update to our premier personal storage product, Jungle Disk Desktop 3.0 adds Sync and an entirely new backup engine that is faster and more efficient than ever.
• Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition 3.0: Our online storage product for small businesses and teams gains Sync support, our new backup engine, and administrator feature control.
• Jungle Disk Simply Backup: An entirely new product for home users that are looking for simple, secure, and reliable backup for their important personal files.
• Jungle Disk Server Edition: Built from the ground up for the demands of large scale server backup, Jungle Disk Server Edition makes it easy to remotely manage backups and restores for Windows and Linux servers from any desktop.

Covering everything that is new in these releases is too much for one blog post. If you’d like to know more about the new products and features, please read our previous announcement posts:

• Jungle Disk Desktop / Workgroup 3.0 Announcement
• Jungle Disk Server Edition Announcement
• Jungle Disk Simply Backup Announcement

As always, upgrades are free for current customers.  Automatic update notifications will be turned on later this week, but for existing customers (including beta users) who want to upgrade to the latest versions now, you can download them from our new Download section. Before upgrading, you should read through the Release Notes which are linked from the download page. They cover common questions and give an overview of what you need to know about the new features in this release.

There are a few items covered in the release notes that we want to highlight here as well:

• Server Edition beta customers on Linux will need to reset your license key (and update your jungledisk-license.xml file with the new key) after updating to the final release.
• The 3.0 Desktop and Workgroup products on Mac now require OSX 10.5 or higher. The Sync feature requires an API only present in Leopard, and only a tiny percentage of our Mac users are still on 10.4. Existing users on 10.4 can continue to use Jungle Disk 2.62.
• The new Backup Vault feature in Desktop and Workgroup stores backups in an entirely new format that utilizes compression and de-duplication for high efficiency. The existing Network Drive-based backup feature is still present in 3.0 under the “Legacy Backup” settings. If you want to move from Legacy Backup to a Backup Vault your data will be re-uploaded into the Backup Vault. For detailed instructions see this KB article.
• We’ve made some pricing changes, however they only affect new subscriptions – current subscription prices are not affected.

We’ve got a lot of great stuff happening this week, including the planned launch of the new Jungle Disk Server Edition and Jungle Disk Simply Backup products, the release of Jungle Disk 3.0 Desktop and Workgroup Editions, as well as a whole new website redesign. As part of this rollout, we are making some changes to our pricing structure that I wanted to explain here first.

Before I get into the specific pricing, I want to make it clear that this pricing only applies to new subscriptions. We’re not changing pricing on existing subscriptions retroactively and have no plans to do so going forward.

After the 3.0 rollout, the pricing for new Jungle Disk subscriptions will be:

• Jungle Disk Simply Backup: $2/month, with 5GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Desktop Edition: $3/month, with 5GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition: $4/month, with 10GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Server Edition: $5/month, with 10GB of free storage

Although prices are increasing for Desktop and Workgroup edition, we’re including free Cloud Files or managed Amazon S3 storage that mostly offsets the pricing difference. The free storage is pooled across the entire account, so if you have multiple Workgroup or Server subscriptions the included storage can be used by any of your computers.

So why are we changing prices, and why include free storage with each subscription? There were several reasons for making the change:

• We’re beefing up our support operation, moving from 5 day a week business hour support to 7 day a week business hour support. We plan to expand support options further going forward. The new pricing structure helps us ensure we can continue to improve our support for all customers.
• We’ve found that many less technically savvy users have no idea how much online storage space they will need. Often times the only point of reference is that their computer has a 500GB or 1TB hard drive, so they think the service is more expensive than it really is. In reality, most Jungle Disk users have 10GB of storage or less. By including a healthy amount of free storage we help casual computer users better understand the amount of space they may expect to use.
• Many Workgroup administrators have complained about lack of predictable monthly costs for the service, due to the variable pricing on storage. While this change doesn’t eliminate that, it helps control it for many situations. We’re looking at offering quota support and other features in the future to give Workgroup admins more control over their storage costs.

While changing prices is never an easy decision, it’s important for us to have a pricing structure in place going forward that keeps the business healthy and addresses the needs of both customers and the business.

Jungle Disk has always attracted a technically savvy user who has a good understanding of storage concepts like backup, network drives, and sync. While most competing online storage services offer just one of those features, we’re proud that our software is unique in its ability to combine all three features in a single product and user interface.  However, we recognize that robust feature set and perceived complexity turns off some potential users – and, makes our customers hesitant to recommend the software to less tech savvy friends and family.

Online backup is critical for all computer users today with the growth of digital personal assets – pictures, music, and files. To help address the needs of a more casual computer user, we are introducing Jungle Disk Simply Backup. As the name implies, Simply Backup is a new version of Jungle Disk for home users who just need a simple, secure, and inexpensive online backup service. The Simply Backup software is built on the same core backup engine that underlies Jungle Disk Desktop, Workgroup, and Server Editions but eliminates the complexity of supporting multiple online disks and network drives.

As with our Desktop Edition software, Simply Backup supports multiple computers at no additional cost, making it a very compelling option for multi-PC households versus other online backup services that charge per computer. If a user decides to move to the full Jungle Disk Desktop Edition in the future, the process is simple and all their data moves with them.

Pricing and availability for Jungle Disk Simply Backup will be announced soon.