Jungle Disk Blog

In the past year since Jungle Disk was first released we occasionally get stories about how Jungle Disk “saved the day” when someone’s hard drive crashed or had a laptop stolen. They are always great to read, but I thought this one was especially interesting because the user had initially forgotten about their Jungle Disk backup and thought all was lost, and blogged about it along the way.

Read how Troy had a 1 month old 1TB drive fail, with estimates of $1200-$2500 to recover the data (if possible).

Then see his elation as he realizes that Jungle Disk has quietly been backing up his files for the last few months, saving the day (and the $1200).

Do you have your own story of how Jungle Disk saved the day? Be sure to tell us about it.

So far the release of the paid version of Jungle Disk has been going great. We’ve actually seen an acceleration of usage and downloads since the release. With that hurdle behind us it’s time to take a fresh look at our roadmap for the near future and beyond. While most Internet companies keep their future plans close to the chest, I think it’s important to share a roadmap with customers so they can help us make sure we’re on the right track – there’s nothing worse than building features that no one wants! Keep in mind that everything below is subject to change however.

In the near future (3-4 weeks) there will be one or two more non-beta releases to fix a few bugs that have come up and add some minor features. The most important bug we’ve fixed recently involves occasional spikes to 100% CPU usage by the Jungle Disk process following a loss of network connectivity or system sleep. We’ve also fixed some issues with proxy authentication and activity logs. In terms of features, we’re looking at adding an optional startup password as well as a dialog-based restore procedure to aid in robust restores of large amounts of data.

Mid term (2-3 months) our  focus is on two key areas. First, on the client we are planning on adding native file system integration on all the platforms. Currently we rely on the WebDAV support in the operating system to integrate with the file system. This had the advantage of providing a single interface for us to support across all the platforms. However, we’ve also come to learn that the operating system WebDAV support can be flawed or buggy in some areas, and each platform has its unique issues. The majority of the support requests we see these days are due to problems with WebDAV rather than issues with Jungle Disk itself. While we can work-around many of these issues it can be difficult to ensure that everything works out of the box for all users. By integrating with the native file system we will bypass the WebDAV layer which will improve reliability and performance. This process involves some low-level work that is unique to each platform and so it will take some time to complete, but in the end we think the product will be more robust than ever.
Secondly, on the backend we are planning on offering support for backing up only the changed portions of large files (delta-updates) rather than the entire file. We’ve been working on this for a while but want to make sure it’s working just right before release – the integrity of your files is the most important thing.

Longer term we want to continue to build a robust backup and personal storage product, while expanding into some of the broader uses for online storage such as web-access to your files, public and private sharing of your files, and “groupware” support where multiple users can have their own accounts with a shared storage space.

What are your thoughts? Are we on the right track? Feel free to respond to this post, or if you’ve got suggestions of your own post them in our Feature Requests forum.

Try as we might, a few annoying bugs slipped in to the 1.40 release. Rather than wait till the next scheduled release to fix them, we’re releasing a minor update to correct the issues. You can get it now from the download page.
The primary issues fixed in this release include:

• Cancel not working or giving odd behavior for background uploads
• Directory caching preventing changes made on one machine from showing up on another
• Timeout during copy / rename of large files using fast file copy

You can see the full details in the release notes.

A quick note on using Jungle Disk to share files between multiple machines. The default cache settings in Jungle Disk make it so that changes made on one machine will not likely show up on another machine for 2-3 minutes. Furthermore, Mac Finder has its own caching and in some cases you may need to remount the volume (using the Jungle Disk menu option) in order for new files to appear. If you want changes to show up faster, you can modify the CacheCheckInterval setting in the jungledisk-settings.ini file (currently this setting is not available in the configuration UI). Simply change the value (in seconds) to reduce the length of time that Jungle Disk waits to check for changes to cached data.

After over a year of testing and feedback, we’re pleased to announced that Jungle Disk is now available for purchase.
We announced our pricing plans a few months back, and although many users told us we were crazy for offering the software for just $20 when they’d happily pay more, we’re sticking to our guns – but don’t wait too long, it may not be $20 forever!
Just to review, here’s what you get for $20:

• Jungle Disk software for all three platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux)
• Rights to install the software on an unlimited number of machines with a single S3 account
• Lifetime free upgrades
• A 30-day money back guarantee

Billing for Jungle Disk is being handled by the new Amazon Payments service. Read all about it in our Amazon Payments post.
We had originally planned to offer a subscription price as well, however user feedback showed a heavy preference towards a flat rate. We’re still considering a subscription offering as an option for the future.

While you’ve been helping us test Jungle Disk, we’ve been helping Amazon test their new Amazon Payments service and we’re launching today as one of their first customers.
Amazon Payments makes it easy to buy Jungle Disk using your existing Amazon.com account and billing information. If you’ve got a credit card on file with Amazon you’re just a few clicks away from buying Jungle Disk.

With Amazon Payments, your personal and billing information never leaves Amazon servers letting you buy with confidence.
Amazon Payments supports all the credit and debit cards accepted for Amazon S3 as well as direct payment from US bank accounts. Note that if you want to buy Jungle Disk via bank account transfer, you will need to sign up with Amazon Payments first and verify your bank account.

As we’ve just announced, Jungle Disk is now available for purchase using the new Amazon Payments service.
We expect Amazon Payments to revolutionize online payments the same way S3 revolutionized online storage  – by making it simple, cheap, and secure while providing an infrastructure that can scale to handle any load. Like S3, Amazon Payments isn’t just a payment site – it’s a payment platform used by web developers to build powerful payment processing systems.
We like Amazon Payments so much we’ve decided to launch a new service to help other sites accept Amazon Payments as well.

Jungle Payments is a free service for anyone that wants to accept Amazon Payments quickly and easily.
Just sign up in a few clicks and you can immediately begin accepting Amazon Payments on your site, blog, or anywhere else you can post a link. The Jungle Payments service is free – you simply pay the standard Amazon Payments processing rates.
Because of how the Amazon Payments service is designed, it’s also secure – Jungle Payments doesn’t have access to the personal or billing information of you or your customers.
Want to find out more? Visit the site, see how it works, and read the FAQ.

The first non-beta version of Jungle Disk is now available from the downloads page.
You can try the new version for up to 30 days before deciding to buy it (but we hope you won’t wait that long!). The previous beta versions will also continue to function for at least 30 days to give you time to upgrade your systems to the final release.
See this post for more information about purchasing the software.

As we continue to add features and fix issues that come up there will be additional beta releases to test in the future. If you’d like to stay informed about them, you can subscribe to blog updates using the bar on the lefthand side of this page.