A few months back we announced we were transitioning from forum-based support to ticket-based support in order to better deal with the growing number of Jungle Disk users and to ensure that all requests promptly responded to. At the time, we left the existing phpBB forums open to provide a public venue for feedback and feature requests. Today, we’re transitioning those forums from phpBB to Zendesk. The existing phpBB forums were a huge target for spammers and also required a different account from our normal account and support systems. The Zendesk forums are integrated with our support account system, support RSS feeds, and are generally much more user friendly.

You can find the new forums on the right-hand side of our support site, at http://support.jungledisk.com

For those not already familiar with them, Kiva is an amazing non-profit organization that crowd-sources micro-loans over the Internet for entrepreneurs around the world. As with many companies these days, they wanted a robust backup and file sharing system for their users without the headache and cost of hosting everything themselves. After a thorough search, we’re happy to say they decided on the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition. Rich, the IT director at Kiva, has written up a great blog post on the Kiva site about why he loves Jungle Disk. His story may not be anything new to our existing users, many of whom have shared similar experiences, but if you’re in the market for an online storage solution we think he does a great job of layout out what makes Jungle Disk the best option out there.

We’re always excited to hear feedback from customers on how they are using our software, and welcome feedback on ways we can make it better. If your company uses Jungle Disk and you’d like to share feedback either privately or publicly, please let us know!

We have learned that the New York Times is writing an article on how small businesses should manage their intellectual property, including recommendations for small businesses on how to avoid mistakes.  Since intellectual property is irreplaceable data, then backing up/storing that data in the cloud is a smart business decision for all small businesses.  We plan on communicating that perspective to the NYT and would like to include a Jungle Disk customer reference.  We think it would be interesting to other small businesses to learn from a real world example where you had a hardware or other failure, but since you had proactively backed up your IP,  your business still had your data available via Jungle Disk.

Please send a direct reply to marcom@jungledisk.com with a contact name, phone number, email, business name and short description of the specific situation or experience where back up protected your IP.   Story deadlines are typically tight so we would really appreciate hearing from you by the end of the day on Tuesday, May 5th.

Thank you,

Erika Brookes
VP of Marketing and Sales

We’re starting to dig in on the next major release of Jungle Disk, but before we got too far we wanted to release an update with the latest improvements and fixes. Jungle Disk 2.61 is a minor update that includes a number of fixes for issues users have encountered in 2.60c. We’d like to thank the users who helped bring these issues to our attention.

You can download the new version using the links below. We will enable the automatic update feature on Wednesday if you’d prefer to update that way instead.

• Desktop Edition downloads
• Workgroup Edition downloads
• Reseller Edition downloads

A list of the improvements and fixes in this release is below.

• Package attribute backed up and restored on Mac using automatic backup
• Improved change detection with multiple computers on the same network drive
• Improved startup times in Windows
• Changed default setting for file versioning to ‘all files’ vs. ‘backup files only’
• Reduced the number of Growl notifications in Mac
• Fixed upgrade issues in Windows related to Jungle Disk service
• Fixed issues with connecting to Windows UNC shares
• Fixed backup configuration dialog in Linux not searching for files beyond first folder
• Fixed issue with Linux startup via init.d
• Fixed case sensitivity issues when using the Network Drive option
• Fixed connection issue when switching between users in Windows
• Fixed issue where leading “*” in exclusions would omit root files
• Fixed Windows search issue in Vista

The feedback we’ve received from our previous Roadmap Post and poll has been loud and clear. Although there is strong interest in everything we mentioned (and more) the top requested feature by far is Sync. That’s great feedback to have and tallies well with the informal feedback we’ve gathered from users. A few folks have suggested that with some improvements to the network drive feature, such as offline support, that Sync wouldn’t be necessary, but we think each feature has unique advantages.

Network Drive Advantages:

• Can be used for “archiving” of files by moving them completely into the cloud
• No initial sync process when connecting from a new computer, you only download what you need
• Works better for large amounts of data, since you only need a small cache on each machine
• Doesn’t waste bandwidth syncing files you may never access

Sync Advantages:

• No need to move your files - you can sync them from their existing locations
• All your content is available offline
• Updating occurs in the background so the latest version can be opened quickly
• Can be used for profiles, configuration files, and other application-specific items that can’t be “moved” to a network drive
• Easy concept to understand, even for non-technical users

Given the strong interest in Sync and the unique advantages it provides, we’re going to strongly consider including it as part of our roadmap, while also continuing to improve the network drive.

I also wanted to give a quick update on Cloud Files. As of Tuesday, the optimization work has been completed and we’ve re-opened creation of Cloud Files online disks to all Jungle Disk users.

We like to give our customers regular updates on what we’re working on for future releases of Jungle Disk, as well as give customers the opportunity to tell us what they think is most important. Jungle Disk’s success has been largely due to your valuable input and comments. While we’re not ready to lay out a detailed roadmap today, we do want to talk about a couple major features we are considering:

1. Public/Private file sharing: While Jungle Disk is primarily used for personal file storage, we know there are many situations where you’d like to share a file or folder with another person or group of people. Imagine being able to generate a link to any file or folder on your online disk and send it to another users to give them temporary or permanent access to that data.
2. Multi-computer sync: Right now we offer two primary ways to use your cloud storage - via automatic backup or a network drive. Sync is really a third-way to use that storage - the ability to have a file or folder on your local disk that is synchronized between multiple computers automatically and instantly. While there are several popular cloud-based sync services already, we’ve heard from a number of users who would like a one-stop solution for backup and sync, as well as the simple pay-as-you-go pricing that comes with Jungle Disk.
3. Offline support for the network drive: Currently our network drive feature requires you to be online to access your data, even though we keep some data in the local cache. Offline support would allow you to keep working when you disconnect, as well as specify which folders should always be kept in the local cache so they can be accessed when you are offline. We know this is important for mobile users, although it does overlap in some ways with the Sync feature.

So what feature are you most interested in? We’ve got a quick poll below for you to tell us, but feel free to leave a comment as well!

We’ve had lots going on around here lately so lets get you up to speed with some quick updates!

First, I’d like to welcome Erika Jolly Brookes as our new VP of Marketing and Sales. Erika is a veteran of the Atlanta technology scene, as an early employee at Mindspring and most recently as VP of Marketing at Earthlink. She is a strong customer advocate and is committed to make our products the best they can be. Please join me in welcoming Erika to the team.

Second, next week our own Mac developer Adam Preble will be speaking at the local Cocoa Heads development group. In his spare time Adam develops iPhone games and will be talking about his experience as an iPhone developer. If you’re in the Atlanta area and interested in iPhone development be sure to check it out! You can also check out Adam’s games on the iTunes store - Shufflepuck and Slingshot (free trial).

Third, I’m pleased to announce that Jungle Disk has been nominated for a CNET Webware 100 award for the second year in a row. We need your vote to win!

Finally, I want to give an update on the status of Cloud Files support for new customers in Jungle Disk. As we previously described, the bug in the first release of Jungle Disk 2.6 which caused excess traffic to the Cloud Files backend allowed the Cloud Files team to identify a number of areas where the system could be better optimized for Jungle Disk users. In a way this was a blessing in disguise, as it may have been many months until there was enough regular traffic to uncover these bottlenecks. Rather than continue to add new users on the system while the team optimized these areas, we decided to hold  off adding new users until the changes were complete. Originally we had hoped to re-open signups last week, but they need a few more days to finish deploying the improvements.  Baring any unforeseen issues,  we are currently planning to allow new Cloud Files customers by the end of this week.

We’ve launched new web-based usage reporting for Cloud Files and Managed Amazon S3 accounts. These reports will let you see your current storage usage (updated daily) as well as upload and download bandwidth and request counts for Amazon S3 online disks. We’ve also consolidated the previous Jungle Disk Plus and Workgroup usage reports into a single reporting interface.

A few things to keep in mind with the reports:

• Get and Put requests are not tracked for Cloud Files disks and will show up as zero
• For Desktop users with personal Amazon S3 accounts, neither the bandwidth nor disk usage reporting will be accurate since your requests go directly to Amazon S3. You can always see your Personal S3 account usage on the Amazon site.
• Jungle Disk Plus upload and download bandwidth is included in the daily usage bandwidth totals, but is also broken out separately on the Jungle Disk Plus bandwidth report.
• Total files and bytes are updated once daily, so the current day’s totals may match what you currently have stored. To get an up to the second count, you can run a Consistency Check from the Help menu in Jungle Disk Monitor.

I also wanted to give a brief update on the status of Cloud Files support. After the 2.60c release, access was restored to all existing Cloud Files users, and existing Cloud Files users can now create new Cloud Files online disks as well. We have temporarily disabled new users from creating Cloud Files online disks while we work with the Cloud Files team to make sure that similar issues in the future don’t cause widespread downtime. We’re in the process of implementing those changes now and once complete will re-open Cloud Files support to new users. We expect this work to be completed within the next few days.

We’ve been working continuously throughout the weekend with the Cloud Files team to help ease the capacity constraints we previously discussed and restore full access to  to Jungle Disk users of Cloud Files. Through our investigation we’ve determined that a significant cause of the problem was a bug in Jungle Disk 2.60a that prevented the directory cache system from working properly and resulted in an excessive load on the Cloud Files system even under normal operation. We have corrected the error and Jungle Disk 2.60c is now available for download.

• Desktop Edition downloads
• Workgroup Edition downloads
• Reseller Edition downloads

All Jungle Disk users of Cloud Files now need to upgrade to 2.60c to restore access. Once you have upgraded, you should have complete access again to all your files. We also recommend that Amazon S3 users upgrade as well - the bug also affected Amazon S3 online disks and results in extra LIST queries and slower backups. In addition, the Cloud Files team found it necessary to release a number of infrastructure updates over the next few days to further optimize usage between Jungle Disk and Cloud Files.  We will keep any disruption from maintenance to a minimum.

The full list of changes in 2.60c is below. A number of other fixes are included and as a bonus we’re including a new feature that was originally planned for later - Growl support for OSX.

• Added Growl support on Mac
• Fixed directory cache bug that caused extra LIST requests
• Fixed bandwidth limiting not working on Jungle Disk Plus uploads
• Fixed loop in rm -rf on Linux
• Fixed crash due to path lenth > 1024
• Added fix for blank filenames to consistency check
• Backup report now submitted correctly when time limit reached
• Fixed import of legacy (pre-2.0) configuration files
• Fixed crash when removing Amazon S3 account

We have posted additional details on the root cause of the problem and the steps we have took to correct the issue and prevent similar problems in the future.

Since launching Cloud Files support last week, we’ve seen an overwhelming response from both new and existing users. Unfortunately we have seen this demand create some unexpected capacity constraints in the system and resulted in some system disruptions between the Jungle Disk and Cloud Files systems.  Rackspace has had to temporarily disable some accounts (about 1-2% of all JungleDisk users) while the issues are resolved.  If you are receiving errors while accessing a Cloud Files online disk you are likely in this group. We have sent an e-mail to affected users, but wanted to post a blog update as well to update you on the current status. Please know that no data loss has occurred.

Rackspace is currently adding users back to the system gradually until everyone is active.  For current status, please monitor the Cloud Files Status page. We’ll be working closely with Rackspace going forward to ensure that sufficient capacity is always available for Jungle Disk users.

Note that Amazon S3 users and online disks on the Amazon S3 service are unaffected by the current situation.