The Jungle Disk Blog

UPDATE (2013-05-19 10:25am CDT): Scheduled software release was completed successfully with no observed customer impact.

We are pleased to announce that our infrastructure upgrade that took place on Sunday the 12th of May was a success with negligible customer disruption. We are already seeing significant improvements to performance and the customer experience.

As part of our continuing improvements we will be releasing a software update to our server-side infrastructure on Sunday, 19th May at 9.00am CDT.

We have scheduled this release for a 2-hour window. Customers may experience short periods of instability where the Jungle Disk client will be unable to connect to the infrastructure, however we expect the actual time that customers are impacted to be minimal. If severe customer disruption exceeds 10 minutes we’ll initiate rollback procedures. As part of our plan, we will do everything possible to minimize disruption to your services.

We will provide status updates throughout the release on our Support Site and via Twitter. If you have any support questions please email support@jungledisk.com or go to our Support Site to Chat or submit a ticket. Please direct any feedback to feedback@jungledisk.com.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this release may cause and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Jungle Disk’s services.

Best regards,
The Jungle Disk Team

P.S. In addition, the Jungle Disk team is working on updates to the client software that we are looking to release in the coming months. Stay tuned.

P.P.S Don’t forget, we’re available via Live Chat. Login to the Support Site to start chatting now!

Update (10:00am CDT 2013-05-12): No additional issues have arisen so maintenance is complete. Thank you for your patience. Please let us know if you experience any subsequent issues via Live Chat (http://support.jungledisk.com/) or ticket (support@jungledisk.com)

Update (9:00am CDT 2013-05-12): All services performing as expected. Hard downtime was negligible during the DNS cutover to our new infrastructure. No customer issues experienced at this point.

Update (8:20am CDT 2013-05-12): New signups (via www.jungledisk.com) are now available.

Update (7:20am CDT 2013-05-12): Control panel access (via www.jungledisk.com) is now available.

Update (7:00am CDT 2013-05-12): Maintenance has begun. Control panel access and signups (via www.jungledisk.com) are temporarily unavailable.

On Sunday the 12th of May at 7:00 am CDT, Jungle Disk will be performing maintenance on our infrastructure in order to upgrade the security, performance and resiliency of our environment.

We have scheduled this maintenance for a 4-hour window. We expect the actual time that customers are impacted to be significantly less than this. During the maintenance window the Jungle Disk website will be unavailable for control panel access and new signups or subscriptions. Customers should also expect short periods of instability where the Jungle Disk client will be unable to connect to the infrastructure. If severe customer disruption exceeds 20 minutes we’ll initiate rollback procedures. As part of our plan, we will do everything possible to minimize disruption to your services.

We will provide status updates throughout the maintenance on our support site (http://support.jungledisk.com) and via Twitter (https://twitter.com/jungledisk).

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Jungle Disk’s services.

Best regards,

The Jungle Disk team

Don’t forget, we’re available via Live Chat. Login into our Support Site to start chatting now!

Our first week of Live Chat with our invited list of beta testers has gone well and we’re excited to roll out the beta program for Live Chat Support to all customers! We reserve the right to pause the beta program at any time if we are unable to fanatically support the live chat volume. Please bear with us as we get to grips with the anticipated load.

You can access Live Chat by logging into your support account at http://support.jungledisk.com.

Currently, Live Chat is available Monday-Friday 8am-4pm CST.

Note: If we are outside chat hours or are already taking the maximum number of chats, your support request will automatically be created into a ticket for you and we will address your ticket as soon as possible.

As mentioned in our earlier post this is a premium service that we will be charging extra for but given this is a new support channel we are offering a free beta in order to get an understanding of how to support customers well.

We are continually working to improve the support experience for customers including increasing our staffing levels and adjusting our support coverage to better manage support requests. We aren’t going to get it right first time so we appreciate your patience and we encourage you to share your feedback, good and bad, with us at feedback@jungledisk.com.

Huw Edwards

General Manager, Jungle Disk

huw@jungledisk.com

Today’s post is written by Paul Ibarra, one of Jungle Disk’s customer support technicians. Paul has been a Racker for almost a year. He began as a support tech for Email before quickly discovering his passion for Jungle Disk and moving over to the team in January 2013. He’s passionate about ping-pong and bowling (he even keeps a bowling ball in the trunk of his car, just in case!)

There is one feature in Jungle Disk that most people (including myself when I first used the product) overlook, which is extremely important on how your data is retained and also how much money you end up paying. Have any idea? Previous versions can make you a hero at the end of the day or make your accounting department gloomy at the end of the month.

Previous Versions play a huge role in your usage/storage fees for the online disk. Ultimately, you have the ability and the power to set this to your personal preference. You just need to determine what’s more important to you, saving data or saving money. Read on to get information on both.

First, what are previous versions? Previous versions are created each time a modification or deletion is made to a file on the Online Disk.

Let’s talk about the configuration options and how they can either help you to save more data or save money.

Saving Data

With the power and cost efficiency of the cloud storing my data isn’t going to break the bank but if I want to store many copies of my data for a long period of time, I can expect my bill to steadily increase. Let’s take a look at the previous version settings for the Backup Vault. We’ll focus on a couple of options found in this location.

The most important option for all users who utilize the backup vault is the line that reads “Expire previous versions and deleted files after” and has a field to enter the number of days. This setting indicates how long each file in the backup’s previous versions is held once it’s modified or deleted. Setting the number of days to a higher amount (30 and above) will give you the cushion you need to ensure that you have access to multiple versions of modified files. You also create a lot of room to recover any file that was deleted, either intentionally or accidentally. Unchecking that option will mean that modified/deleted files are kept indefinitely which will cause your Online Disk to grow quite a bit since you will never be removing data but also ensure that you have all of the previous versions that have been created.

If you’re using the Workgroup or Server Editions, you may have users/servers off site and located in another time zone. Checking the option “Ignore timezone shifts when detecting changed files” will ensure that you are not creating and storing unnecessary previous versions.

By default the number of days is set to 60 which provides you with a vast of amount of backups and previous versions. How much you keep is entirely up to you.

For Workgroup and Desktop Edition users, the second location (Configure > expand the Online Disk >expand Network Drive > select Previous Versions) will be applied to any documents you have saved to your Network Drive. Here you have a few more options to configure that allow you retain as much (or as little) information you would like. By default, this is also set to 60 days and to keep at most 10 previous versions of a particular file.  If you uncheck the box “Remove previous version after [input box] days” all previous versions of all files will be kept indefinitely.

Saving Money

“What if I don’t need to retain all of this information? I just want to make sure I have a copy backed up to restore from if I need to.”

This question/comment applies to a lot of our customers (myself included). What can I do? Ensuring that you have modest settings in place in these previous version locations will help you maintain lower usage for your online disks so you don’t wind up paying more than you planned on at the end of your billing cycle.

Here are some recommendations:

Backup Vault > Backup Options

1. Leave box checked for “Backup in-use files (NTFS formatted drives only)
2. Check “Ignore timezone shifts when detecting changed files
3. Set the number of days to a low amount for the option “Expire previous versions and deleted files after [input box] days.” For example, my personal setting for this option is 5 days since I run a backup via the vault twice a week (Wednesday and Sunday evenings). This ensures that I always have 2 backups stored on my online disk.

Network Drive > Previous Versions (Applies to my Legacy Backup also)

1. Leave boxes checked for “Keep previous versions of changed files” and “Keep previous versions of deleted files”
2. Select All Files for “Keep previous versions for:”
3. “Don’t keep previous versions for files over” – Personally, I have this set for 500MB. This makes certain that all of my data intensive files/high resolution pictures/presentations/etc. are tucked away safely, but my 2.5 GB high definition download of Top Gun doesn’t get saved. If I lose Top Gun, I lose Maverick and Goose for a little bit, but I can always re-download it. What’s important is that my family photos, and created documents get saved.
4. “Remove previous versions after [input box] days” – I have this set to 3, but anywhere between 2-7 will work.
5. Uncheck “Keep at least [input box] previous versions…” – Having this checked will keep X amount of previous versions indefinitely and you can expect your online disk to grow as you modify files.
6. “Keep at most [input box] previous versions…” – I have this set to 2. To make this more manageable, we recommend 2-3.

The above are simply recommendations on keeping your usage down which will keep your monthly payment down along with it. You have the ability to modify these settings in any way you see fit.

Lastly, you will want to make sure that your Backup Cleanup process is running successfully (this is set to run once a week). This process removes your expired previous versions keeping your usage down. You can check the status of the Backup Cleanup by going to the Activity Monitor, then select Logs > View Backup History. You will see an entry with the Result showing as CLEANUP. If you do not see this completing successfully, contact support and we’ll help you get squared away.

Paul Ibarra

Jungle Disk Customer Support

support@jungledisk.com

We’re excited to announce our beta program for Live Chat Support. Live Support has been one of the most requested improvements from customers and we’re addressing that with this offering.

This is a premium service that we will be charging extra for but given this is a new support channel we are offering a free beta in order to get an understanding of how to support customers fanatically.

Over the past couple of months we have collected a list of customers who have requested live support and declared interest in being part of the beta. We are now rolling out this feature to the first 100 beta customers in increments.

If you have not previously contacted us about this and would like to be added to the beta program, subject to capacity, please email support@jungledisk.com with the subject line “Request to be added to Live Chat Support Beta”. We will add you to the list and include you once we have capacity.

We are continually working to improve the support experience for customers including increasing our staffing levels and adjusting our support coverage to better manage support requests. We aren’t going to get it right the first time so we appreciate your patience and we encourage you to share your feedback, good and bad, with us at feedback@jungledisk.com.

Huw Edwards

General Manager, Jungle Disk

huw@jungledisk.com

UPDATE: We identified the root cause to the issue with the attempted maintenance. It was regarding how Cloud Files interacts with our upgraded infrastructure. We will be conducting maintenance again in a couple of weeks and this time we will be sending a notification email to all customers and we will conduct the maintenance during non business hours on a weekend to minimize disruption to customers. 

UPDATE: At around 10:13 a.m CDT we began receiving reports of customers experiencing issues with their clients connecting to Jungle Disk infrastructure. At 10:31 a.m. CDT we initiated roll-back procedures and Jungle Disk services have been restored.

UPDATE: At 09:04 a.m. CDT we began scheduled maintenance. JungleDisk.com is unavailable for new signups and control panel access.

On Tuesday, March 19 at 9:00 a.m. CDT, Jungle Disk will perform maintenance on our infrastructure in order to upgrade the security, performance and resiliency of our environment. During the upgrade, you will experience instability and loss of connectivity to Jungle Disk infrastructure.

We have scheduled this maintenance for a two-hour window. We expect the maintenance will take significantly less time than this, but if the maintenance window exceeds this we’ll initiate rollback procedures. Along with periods of instability and loss of connectivity to the Jungle Disk infrastructure, will be times that the Jungle Disk client will be unable to connect to the infrastructure.  As part of our plan, we will do everything possible to minimize disruption to your services.

As mentioned previously, we are not thrilled by having to undertake this maintenance during the business hours of a number of our customers. This is far from an ideal choice and the scheduled downtime is in fact the best “worst choice” given the circumstances we are facing.  The largest impact should be to those trying to access the Jungle Disk website to add subscriptions or sign up as a new customer during that window. We sincerely hope this is a one-off and going forward we hope to schedule maintenance at more appropriate times.

We will provide status updates on our support site (http://support.jungledisk.com) and we’ll update this blog post when maintenance is complete.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Jungle Disk’s services.

UPDATE 3: We are delaying the scheduled maintenance in order to address some outstanding items before potentially impacting customers during maintenance. We will provide 24 hour notice ahead of a new scheduled date/time.

UPDATE 2: We are delaying the scheduled maintenance to Monday, February 25 at 2:00 p.m. CST.

UPDATE 1: We are not thrilled by having to undertake this maintenance during business hours. This is far from an ideal choice and the scheduled downtime is in fact the best “worst choice” given the circumstances we are facing.  The largest impact should be to those trying to access the Jungle Disk website to add subscriptions or sign up as a new customer during that window. We should’ve provided this additional context in the original post. We sincerely hope this is a one-off and going forward we plan to schedule maintenance at more appropriate times and provide more advance notice.

___________

Jungle Disk will perform maintenance on our infrastructure in order to upgrade the security, performance and resiliency of our environment. During the upgrade, you will experience instability and loss of connectivity to Jungle Disk infrastructure.

We have scheduled this maintenance for a two-hour window. We expect the maintenance will take significantly less time than this, but if the maintenance window exceeds this we’ll initiate rollback procedures. Along with periods of instability and loss of connectivity to the Jungle Disk infrastructure, will be times that the Jungle Disk client will be unable to connect to the infrastructure.  As part of our plan, we will do everything possible to minimize disruption to your services.

We will provide status updates on our support site (http://support.jungledisk.com) and we’ll update this blog post when maintenance is complete.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Jungle Disk’s services.

This blog post is written by Trey Fischer, Jungle Disk’s new CTO.

Since coming on board in January I’ve reviewed our existing infrastructure and operations and looked into our long list of customer requests. We have a lot to do and we’re up for the challenge.

One request we have heard from many of you is support for Windows 8 and Windows 2012.  After performing testing with Jungle Disk running on Windows 8 and Windows 2012, we‘re happy to announce full support for Jungle Disk on these platforms. We continue to review requests for support of other platforms and hope to add additional ones in the future.

We are also investing in our underlying Jungle Disk infrastructure to improve the security, performance and resiliency of our environment. We will conduct maintenance in the coming days to upgrade our hardware and we’ll update you on the details in a separate post.

A little background on me: I have been a Racker for nine years and I have been in IT for almost 15 years; working in the banking, ecommerce, travel and retail industries.  At Rackspace I’ve had the opportunity to work in several parts of our business: from a lead technician in Customer Support for our enterprise customers, to operations for our Dedicated Hosting business, to a systems engineer on our Managed Cloud offering. I’m typically a humble guy but Huw insisted that I share with you that I am a recipient of the Fanatical Jacket Award, the highest accolade a Racker can receive. I was awarded it during my time in customer support working for one of our largest enterprise customers – if you are interested in hearing more I’d be happy to share the story and experience.

I am excited to join the Jungle Disk team and I look forward to hearing from you about how we can make things better. We are making moves behind the scenes everyday but it will take time for you to see some of them. Some of our initial goals are to optimize the current infrastructure, perform an extensive security review of our platform and review all of your product feedback.  To speed things up, we will continually add more Rackers to the Jungle Disk team. With every interaction we strive to provide Fanatical Support to our customers, including those who submit trouble tickets. And we have plans to implement live chat support as an upgrade option in the next couple of months.

There’s more to come soon on live support and we are very interested to hear any feedback you have around both support and the product; please send your comments to feedback@jungledisk.com.

Best regards,

Trey Fischer

CTO, Jungle Disk

trey@jungledisk.com

We hope you had happy holidays and are raring to go in 2013! It’s been a busy past month at Jungle Disk and we want to update you on our progress.

We Hear You

Over the past month we have been busy working on our renewed commitment to you, our customers. We sent our first-ever customer feedback survey out to half of the Jungle Disk customer base on December 5th and we are now analyzing the responses. We will discuss the findings in coming weeks, once the results are tabulated, but at a high level, the responses were extremely polarized. We received a large number of positive responses from those of you who love the service and would highly recommend it to your friends or colleagues. We also received a large number of negative responses from some of you who would not recommend Jungle Disk because of our lack of communication, dearth of visible product development, and the absence of live customer support. We’ve found this feedback very useful, and we’re addressing each of the critiques mentioned here in our new plans for the product.  We realize it will take time and hard work to win back the customers we have disappointed, but that is our goal as a team.

Introducing Our New CTO

A big focus of ours has been building out the Jungle Disk team and we are pleased to introduce Trey Fischer (trey@jungledisk.com) who has come onboard to lead all technical and operational efforts for the Jungle Disk product. You can think of him as our de-facto CTO. Trey has been at Rackspace for 9 years and is one of the most talented and highly regarded Rackers at the company (at Rackspace, we call ourselves “Rackers”). Having worked on the “front lines” in the dedicated hosting business supporting one of Rackspace’s larger customers, and leading the Windows Support environment for Rackspace’s Managed Cloud product, he has seen it all and is going to be huge asset to the Jungle Disk team.

In his latest role Trey has been intimately involved with the customer support of the new Rackspace Cloud Backup product, the next generation of the Jungle Disk backup product which is currently available to Rackspace customers for backing up Cloud Servers, and which we are looking to roll out to Jungle Disk customers this year. You can expect to hear more from Trey as he engages with technical topics here on the blog.

Back to Basics

We are going to introduce a “Best Practices” series of posts on the blog. Written by our customer support technicians, these posts will provide explanations and walkthroughs for common uses of the Jungle Disk product, such as setting up a Backup Vault or best practices for using the Network Drive with a team in your organization. Following these best practices can ensure smooth functioning of the product. Although these practices may be basic stuff for the more experienced among you, and a number of these gems already exist in our customer support forums (http://support.jungledisk.com/forums), we think the blog will be a good place to showcase updated versions of these practices to help you use Jungle Disk successfully. Stay tuned and expect to see this series kick-off in a couple of weeks.

As highlighted previously we want to hear from you, our customers. We encourage you to share your thoughts with us at feedback@jungledisk.com.

Huw Edwards

General Manager, Jungle Disk

huw@jungledisk.com

First, an apology

We have not engaged with you in quite some time. We could make excuses for why this happened, but the truth is we lost our focus with you, our valued Jungle Disk customers. For this, we are truly sorry. The good news is that things are going to change.

So, what have we been up to?

The past 18 months have been a pivotal period for Rackspace, Jungle Disk’s parent company. Rackspace launched its open cloud platform, powered by OpenStack, taking a huge step towards a vision of an open cloud future that eliminates the fear of vendor lock-in. As part of this effort, we are rebuilding the Jungle Disk technology from the ground up and recently released the first iteration of this new platform: Rackspace Cloud Backup. Today, this provides Rackspace customers a more usable and scalable way to backup their Cloud Servers.

During this period we did a poor job of communicating with you about the new technologies Rackspace was building, which would drive greater value for customers over time.

Future for Jungle Disk

As of November 2012, we have a new team in charge of Jungle Disk and a vision for the future that aligns us with our parent, Rackspace. We are re-engaging with our customers, and are eager to hear your concerns and suggestions.

We recognize it may take time to regain some customers’ trust and loyalty, but that journey begins today and I’m excited to lead the charge.

During 2013, we plan to release new versions of server and workstation backup to Jungle Disk customers. These products will be based on the awesome new technology that powers server backup in the Rackspace open cloud. Going forward, our primary focus will be on solutions targeted at serving the needs of business customers of all sizes —the same customers Rackspace serves so well today. We are renewing our commitment to current customers and while we believe the new products will delight everyone, we will help find the right solution for those who don’t feel our new platform is right for them.

In the meantime, if you have had an issue with Jungle Disk where the resolution was not to your satisfaction, we invite you to contact us at support@jungledisk.com. We’ve committed additional resources to clear up all outstanding issues.

More to come and a call to action

Over the coming weeks and months you can expect to hear a lot more from us. We are reaching out to half of our customer base now to ask a single question: “Would you recommend Jungle Disk to a friend or colleague?” We want to gauge how our customers feel today and set a baseline from which we can improve. We will use this blog to communicate more detail on our product and the cloud backup market.

We want to hear from you, our customers. We encourage you to share your thoughts with us at feedback@jungledisk.com. It may take some time to respond to all of the feedback, but we will work to respond to every submission.

Thank you for your loyalty.

Huw Edwards

General Manager, Jungle Disk

huw@jungledisk.com