Jungle Disk Blog

Jungle Disk was featured this week on the Security Now! Podcast with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte, including an interview with yours truly. The interview starts at about 18:40. It covers the basics of Jungle Disk as well as some details about the security and encryption it provides.

The Jungle Disk Plus beta is still on target for tomorrow, stay tuned to the blog for the latest news!

We try to keep close parity between all the platforms that Jungle Disk supports, both in terms of functionality and support. So far I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that, releasing new features and updates for all three platforms simultaneously. However, recently it’s become apparent that the Linux version of Jungle Disk was in need of some “TLC”. As with the current Mac and Windows versions of Jungle Disk, the Linux version requires an external WebDAV client to support filesystem mounting. In the case of Mac and Windows that client is built into the OS, however on Linux it’s provided by the 3rd party DavFS software. Installing, configuring, and troubleshooting DavFS has proven troublesome, and changes in the software have made it less reliable over time. Because of this, we’re accelerating our plans for native filesystem integration on Linux and will be including it in the next beta release later this week.

Native filesystem integration brings a significant improvement in performance.
Previously, all filesystem requests went through a chain that looked like:
Kernel -> FUSE -> DavFS -> WebDAV -> JungleDisk -> S3
Now, requests go directly from the Kernel FUSE module to Jungle Disk:
Kernel -> FUSE -> JungleDisk -> S3

In addition to improving performance and reliability, direct integration brings a host of new functionality including:

• Support for backing up symlinks, devices, fifos and other special files
• Preservation of modification times, file permissions, and ownership
• Direct mounting on boot from fstab

Linux is only about 10% of our user base, but we consider it a very important platform to support. It is a second platform for many of our Mac and Windows users, it’s used by many folks who recommend the software to their less technical friends, and beyond that we just like it. Don’t worry Mac and Windows users – your native filesystem integration will be coming along soon!

Today we’re excited to announce Jungle Disk Plus, an optional companion service for Jungle Disk that will be coming soon.

Over the past year, we’ve received a number of feature requests for functionality that goes beyond what the Amazon S3 platform provides. Rather than simply say, “sorry, that’s not possible” we’ve decided to extend the functionality of the S3 platform through servers hosted at Amazon datacenters. The Jungle Disk Plus service adds new features that were previously impossible with Amazon S3 including:

• Block-level file updates, allowing you to upload only the changed portions of large files
  This enables you to back up large files that only change a little bit each day, such as mailboxes and databases, without uploading the entire file. Only the changed portions of the file are uploaded.
• Upload resume, allowing you to resume uploads of large files where they left off
  Currently if you cancel an upload or lose your connection when uploading a large file, you need to restart the upload from the beginning. Upload resume allows you to continue the upload where you left off automatically.
• Web-based access to your files
  This feature, which you can choose to enable with Jungle Disk Plus, allows you to access your stored files from a standard web browser on any computer around the world. You can also upload new files directly from the browser over a secure SSL connection.
• Increased performance for uploading large files over high-bandwidth connections
  We’ve optimized the TCP settings on our EC2 servers to offer increased performance for users with high-bandwidth connections (over 2mbps upstream). In testing we’ve been able to sustain upload rates of 20mbps or more over a sufficiently fast connection.

Jungle Disk Plus is an optional service – we’re not requiring existing or future Jungle Disk users to sign up for it, however we want to make these features available to those who need them. The Jungle Disk Plus service will be priced at only $1 per month, which goes directly to support the costs of running the servers that provide this new functionality. You can read more about Jungle Disk Plus in the FAQ.
It’s important to note that the introduction of Jungle Disk Plus does not change our commitment to continued free upgrades for the software. Jungle Disk Plus contains only those features which go beyond the basic Amazon S3 service and require us to run our own servers. We’re continuing to add features to the core software that do not require Jungle Disk Plus. Features you will see soon include:

• Native filesystem integration for Windows, Mac, and Linux
  By directly integrating with the filesystem we can bypass the WebDAV layer, improving performance and eliminating a source of common problems. We’ll be shipping the first version of this on the Linux platform this week.
• Support for “standard” S3 buckets and object names
  We’ve received a number of requests from users who want to use Jungle Disk as a generic tool for managing S3 content, so we’ve decided to offer the option to use S3 bucket and object names without the additional encoding currently done by Jungle Disk
• Download-resume, for large downloads or restores that get cut off
• Backup preview, to see what files will be updated the next time a backup is run
• Windows Task Scheduler integration
• Point-in-time restore from previous versions (ala Time Machine)
• …and much more

A beta version of Jungle Disk with the new Jungle Disk Plus features will be available to all users later this week. We welcome any comments you have on the new service, and remember that you can always post feature requests to our Feature Requests Forum.

We’ve released a minor update for Jungle Disk for Windows Home Server that fixes the issues uncovered so far by beta testers. We recommend all users of the Jungle Disk for WHS beta release update to the new version. To update, simply uninstall the previous version, then download and install the new version. The changes in this version are listed below:

• Changes to avoid an issue with disappearing configuration
• Added button to clear the errors & warnings list
• Fixed text wrapping issue in errors list
• Fixed error message when backing up empty share

Update: We were able to track down a few more issues and decided to include those fixes as well, so 1.02b is now available.  The additional fixes include:

• Occasional empty (blue) console tab for Online Backup
• List of shared folders not updated in settings when adding/removing shares