Jungle Disk Blog

The next beta version of Jungle Disk on our roadmap is now available. Version 1.25 adds a number of new features and fixes a few issues that were found since the last release. Some key additions include:

• Fast file rename / copy support
• Upgraded AES-256 encryption
• Optional SSL for extra in-transit security
• Preservation of file modification times for backup

As always, you can see the full list of changes in the release notes.

I discussed the fast file rename support in detail in a blog posting yesterday. I’d like to touch briefly on two other new features today. First is the AES-256 encryption support. Jungle Disk has always had very secure encryption using the RC4 algorithm with a 128 bit per-file key. However, we’ve had requests to go even further so we’re now using the industry standard AES algorithm with a 256 bit per-file key. There isn’t any visible difference to users, except that you can rest assured knowing that your data is protected by the highest level of encryption commonly in use today. All newly uploaded data will automatically use AES-256. We’ve also updated our GPL source code on the download page to demonstrate key derivation and decryption using AES-256 for authors creating Jungle Disk compatible utilities.

Next up is modification time persistence. This is something that has been a top request for a while now, but has been challenging to implement for a few reasons. First is that S3 does not support a way to “set” the modification time to something other than the current date. We’ve managed to work around this limitation with a flexible meta-data scheme. The second issue is that the WebDAV protocol we use to integrate with the operating system does not have a standard method for setting modification times. Microsoft has implemented their own method, which we support for mapped drives in Windows XP and Vista so that copied files have their modified times preserved (note that there is a bug in XP that requires this hotfix if you want modification times to work correctly). Unfortunately on Mac and Linux the operating system never sends the modification time information to Jungle Disk. The good news however is that this doesn’t affect the automatic backup feature – it will correctly preserve modification times on all platforms. In fact, if you’ve already got data backed up, the first time a backup runs under the new version it will fix the modification times for all existing files (without re-uploading them). This may cause the first backup to run a bit slower than normal if you have a large number of files backed up, but shouldn’t cause noticable slowdown in future runs.

The next beta release of Jungle Disk, which should be available tomorrow pending final testing, adds a raft of features including fast file renaming and copying. As many Jungle Disk users are aware, moving or renaming files with the current version of Jungle Disk can be a painful process. Because S3 does not allow objects to be renamed in-place once uploaded, moving or renaming a file requires it to be re-uploaded which takes time and can cost money as well since S3 charges for data transfers. While we still hope that Amazon will remove this limitation in the future, we’ve decided to put an interim solution in place to remove this headache and the associated costs.

To enable fast file renaming and copying, we’ve placed servers in Amazon.com datacenters using their EC2 service. When you need to rename, move, or copy a file on your Jungle Disk a request is sent to these servers with the old and new names. The EC2 server will copy the data from the old name to the new name without the data ever leaving the Amazon data center. This means that it not only occurs quickly, but you aren’t charged any bandwidth for the operation. The request sent from Jungle Disk to the servers is signed such that only that specific operation can be performed. In addition, the file data stays encrypted at all times during the transfer, and stays completely within Amazon’s internal network. Your secret key and encryption keys are never sent out of your machine.

This is the first of several features on our roadmap that will make use of Amazon’s EC2 servers. The ability to host services from within Amazon’s datacenters enables us to provide all kinds of functionality that would otherwise be impossible with the basic S3 API. However, if for any reason you’d prefer to not have your Jungle Disk client interact with these EC2 servers, the fast rename feature (as well as future EC2-enabled features) can easily be turned off in the options. In addition, should the Jungle Disk EC2 servers be unavailable for any reason, the Jungle Disk software will gracefully fall back to the old rename method.

As we recently posted , our roadmap for the remainder of the Jungle Disk beta is now in place, and we expect the official non-beta release of the software will occur in 2-3 months. We’re now ready to announce the planned pricing for the release version of the software as well. We’ve considered the best pricing model for a long time now and listened closely to feedback from our great beta testers. In the end, we decided to give you two options to choose from, both incredibly simple and cheap:

The release version of the Jungle Disk software will cost:

• $20 for a lifetime purchase with free upgrades
    OR 
•  $1 per month subscription with no up-front cost (and of course free upgrades)

That’s it – we’re not charging anything additional based on the amount you store. You pay the same $0.15 per gigabyte directly to Amazon.

With either the purchase or subscription version you can install and use the software on as many computers as you want using the same S3 Account. No need to buy each platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) separately  – you get all three for one price.
We’ll also be offering a free trial period for both new users and existing beta testers who are still deciding if Jungle Disk and S3 are right for them.
Please note that this pricing only applies to the release version of the software. The beta version will remain free to use for the remainder of the beta period, and beta versions will continue to function for at least 30 days after the release version is available.
And as always there are no ads, no bundles, and no spyware. Software as we think it should be.

We really think this pricing model will accommodate all users, and we’re eager to get your feedback.

So far testing of the 1.21 release of Jungle Disk has been going great. Only a few minor issues have been reported and those will be fixed in the next release. The automatic crash reporting has been a success as well – we’ve only had about 5 crashes reported total (which is great), and we’ve been able to find and fix almost all of them.

We’ve seen a huge influx of new users recently thanks to some great articles about storing your iTunes library on S3 and backing up your Aperture library to S3 using Jungle Disk. Both of these are great example of how Jungle Disk can be used as more than just a simple backup utility.

We’re busy working on features for the next release, but some of them are so exciting I couldn’t resist sharing a preview. Here’s what you can look forward to in the next few versions:

Features for the next minor release (1.25)

• Fast file copying / renaming / moving without the need to re-upload (YES!) 
• AES encryption with up to 256 bit keys
• Keep modification timestamp for backed up files
• Optional SSL for connections to S3 (for a second layer of encryption in transit) 
• Auto mount/un-mount volume on OSX

Features for the next major release (1.30)

• Backup history / logs
• Backup of in-use files
• Incremental backup of only the changed portion of large files (YES! YES!)

Features for beyond

• Upload resume for partial uploads
• Optional web-based access to files

Hopefully some of these features are exciting to you too! Something else you want? Be sure to tell us in our feature request forum. We try to focus on the features that benefit the largest number of users first, but we’re always looking for great ideas.