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.
40 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI
Subscribe to our feed
Todd Vierling said,
December 17, 2007 @ 2:26 pm
I think it’s understandable that some features would eventually require a subscription fee — while “data transfer” between EC2 and S3 is free, EC2 instance runtime is not. There’s a justifiable trade-off need there.
In the holiday season spirit, here’s a toast to hope that the $1/month will be picked up by enough users, to keep development going without getting into the trap of the upward cost spiral….
Tomas Fulopp said,
December 17, 2007 @ 4:52 pm
I am utterly disappointed. This is just another way of increasing the price, which you promised never to raise. And you always kept promising the block-level upload, never ever mentioning it would be at a premium price! I don’t think I would have paid the license if I knew you were going to do tricks like this.
Let me clarify that this is not about money but about the image. With this kind of service you will scare off people and sooner or later there will be a good open source community-developed project that will evolve faster, provide better features, and be free. So I think this move makes the beginning of an end of JungleDisk. To my great sorrow, because I liked it very much.
Jungle Dave said,
December 17, 2007 @ 5:08 pm
If there were any way to offer the features in Jungle Disk Plus outside a subscription, we would do it. In fact, we’ve asked Amazon to build these features directly into S3 but so far they have chosen not to. Should they support upload resume, block-level updates, or other features directly in S3 in the future we will certainly look to put them in the basic software product and eliminate the subscription.
As for other S3 software, they are met with the same limitations of the Amazon S3 service we face, and have the same choice – either don’t offer these features, or offer them as a service to pay for the cost of providing them. Faced with this decision we decided to offer the features as an optional service, rather than not offer them at all. We’re offering a free year of service as a thank-you to our early adopters but if anyone would prefer a refund we would be happy to offer that instead.
Lance said,
December 17, 2007 @ 5:57 pm
Can’t wait to try “plus” out!
Block level is a definite bonus! As is Web access!
Bravo!
Jeremy Bank said,
December 17, 2007 @ 7:06 pm
The biggest thing here for me is the upcoming support for standard S3 stuff. I want to use S3 to host some large files for web access, and finding a program to upload and manage them with little hassle has been difficult.
Hannes said,
December 17, 2007 @ 7:09 pm
I think the new features of the Plus version are really promising and well worth a dollar a month – heck that’s not even half the price för a cup of coffe in Sweden. I just hope that the improved speed will not be eaten up by slow links between Sweden and wherever the S3 servers are located. I would really like to be able to use my 100Mbps upload speed to its full extent!
keep up the good work! And don’t go out of business!!
Jungle Dave said,
December 17, 2007 @ 7:59 pm
We’ll be interested to hear from users how much of an improvement the server TCP optimizations in Jungle Disk Plus provide. In theory, if you’ve got a fast connection with low packet loss to Amazon S3, you should get good rates even if your latency is high (100-200ms). We do most of our testing on a 100mbit line with about 100ms latency to Amazon and have seen speeds of 10-20mbps, compared to a max of 2-6mbps when going direct to S3.
Jim Peterson said,
December 17, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
So, does the plus service mean that all of my data will first go to your servers and then to my S3 account? What sort of security meachanism do I have to make sure you are not keeping some of my data on your servers in cache foldrs?
Jeffrey Smith said,
December 17, 2007 @ 10:20 pm
Jungle Disk Plus sounds great and I’d be happy to subscribe
Why does Block-level file updates need to be part of the subscription service, is it much different to using rsync?
Jungle Dave said,
December 17, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
Regarding the security, please read the Jungle Disk Plus FAQ linked in the blog post. We’ve detailed the steps we take to ensure data security, but the most important is that when encryption is enabled your data stays encrypted through the entire process after leaving your machine.
Regarding the block-level updates & rsync – rsync requires a server-side rsync daemon in order to support delta-updates. Our Jungle Disk Plus servers provide this feature since it is not built in to Amazon S3 itself.
Viren said,
December 18, 2007 @ 12:46 am
Will ‘plus’ also affect JungleDisk for WHS users as well?
Mike Rickman said,
December 18, 2007 @ 1:46 am
I too, will be signing up for the “Plus” service. Can’t wait to try it out! Terrific work, guys… I’m *VERY* happy with Jungle Disk and Amazon S3.
Olivier Bruchez said,
December 18, 2007 @ 3:13 am
> Block-level file updates
Great! Count me in.
$1 a month is not that bad. It depends what price your data is worth to you. For me, it’s definitely worth it.
BTW, for big files, shouldn’t that dollar be (at least partially) compensated by the fact that less data will be transfered?
David Underhill said,
December 18, 2007 @ 4:28 am
This is a great new service and the billing is very logical. As you said, these are features you have to support with your own EC2 resources.
Delta updates is a very nice feature!
Another feature that S3 has been lagging on is the ability to place a cap on the maximum bill for the month. Now that all the data goes through the Jungle Disk servers, you could add this feature as well. I’d love to be able to set a maximum cap on the transfer bandwidth (obviously you can’t control the total amount of data we store, but I’m really on concerned about transfer charges accidentally growing larger than expected).
Bassam said,
December 18, 2007 @ 4:32 am
What really stops me from converting to Jungle is the backup interface. The Mozy interface shows you the whole file-system with check boxes next to files and folders rather than having to browse and pick each individually as in the Jungle interface. I hope some renovation is planned for this.
Ben said,
December 18, 2007 @ 6:58 am
@Jungle Dave: Thankyou. This is an excellent way to extend the capability of the product without waiting for Amazon to make these changes and $1 a month is a price I’m more than happy to pay…
Travis said,
December 18, 2007 @ 7:20 am
Tremendous!!
Really appreciate the responsiveness displayed to feature suggestions from your user-base!
I look forward to accessing/subscribing to the, completely voluntary, JD+ features. And, what a nice thing you’ve done giving a free 12 month taste. You didn’t have to do this and, it’s very much appreciated!
I’m also excited about some of the new features in “regular” JD, like scheduling.
Merry Christmas to all of you there at Jungle Disk! You’re doing a great job.
Thank you!
RedYetiDave said,
December 18, 2007 @ 7:25 am
Sounds great – definitely worth having but, as a non-US user this sentence in the Plus FAQ gives me cause for concern:
“Bandwidth charges for Jungle Disk Plus features will be added to your monthly Jungle Disk Plus fee and are not included in your monthly S3 bill.”
That sounds as if I’m going to be billed with two separate payments per month, meaning a forex transaction charge of £1.50 for each from my bank. Since Jungle Disk Plus is only £0.50 that’s ups the cost of the service considerably.
Am I right about this? I hope not.
Some way of billing for a year up-front might sort that out (if I’m right!).
Tim said,
December 18, 2007 @ 7:52 am
Sweet, I signed up yesterday!!!
Due to the time that has passed since i did my first upload of 11GB of data, a lot of my files have changed only slightly and needs to be re-uploaded
I was going to hold off running my latest backup until block level updates were released however it appears thats sooner rather than later!
Tim
Jungle Dave said,
December 18, 2007 @ 10:27 am
@WHS – Jungle Disk for WHS will support the Jungle Disk Plus features at in the future, but they will continue to be optional.
@Non-US Users – We are looking at offering a way to pre-pay for a number of months and amount of transfer in order to reduce excess charges. Hopefully Amazon Payments will add support for billing in local currency in the future as well.
Rob Vaughan said,
December 18, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
Absolutely brilliant!
really pleased by all of this, it makes the JD/S3 combo almost perfect for my needs. Pricing sounds totally fair, and pleasingly cheap. I realised some time ago that these long-awaited new features (block level uploads and upload resume) would require data to go via EC2 and hence would attract more charges, and I wondered how you would deal with that. I have to say this has turned out far better (ie. cheaper) than I hoped. Oh, and as a security nerd, thanks also for spelling out all the security implications of the new stuff so well. (Needless to say I’ll probably not be using the web access…!)
Great work guys, thanks again.
Oh, also I like the fact (*if* I understand it all correctly) that data uploaded via the “plus” service goes onto S3 in a format that is backwards-compatible with being subsequently downloaded just via the “normal” client – say if someone decided to opt out of plus in the future, or, heaven forbid, if JD went bust say?
Cheers,
Rob – very happy customer.
PS – to the comment above about the backup UI, I prefer JD to all the ones I’ve tried. I found Mozy a bit confusing at first.
Jungle Dave said,
December 18, 2007 @ 4:17 pm
@Rob – Yes, the updated files are stored “backwards compatible” (i.e. as whole files, not some wierd delta format) so they can be read by any tool.
Sean Ross said,
December 19, 2007 @ 12:58 pm
You guys just made my DAY! Thanks for making jungle disk the most affordable option for mac and small business backup.
Steve Bush said,
December 19, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
This is great! Web access is my button… I’d hope I can point a link to my JD files such than anyone can get to them and thus have a JD folder be a seamless extension of my website. $1 is great, I’m a big believer in micro-payment systems, $1/month is trivial for all customers and adds up to a great deal of support to you. Thanks Jungle Dave!
Mark Barnes said,
December 20, 2007 @ 8:19 am
@RedYetiDave
I got fed up of paying silly amounts for $ transactions on my credit card over a year ago. The solution is a Post Office Credit Card. AFAIK it’s the only UK card that doesn’t charge a premium (either flat rate or %age) for overseas transactions. I keep mine handy for everytime I buy something in dollars or euros.
RedYetiDave said,
December 20, 2007 @ 12:43 pm
@Mark Barnes – Thanks – the Nationwide also do one but hadn’t heard of that – Don’t fancy setting up a new account just for forex but it might come to that.
frankjungle said,
December 20, 2007 @ 1:51 pm
I agree with Tomas that there’s an aroma of bait-and-switch here. (”…you always kept promising the block-level upload, never ever mentioning it would be at a premium price! I don’t think I would have paid the license if I knew you were going to do tricks like this.”) Still, the plan sounds competitive. I have a question about block-level updates and encryption, which I’ll put in the forum. Thanks.
Jungle Dave said,
December 20, 2007 @ 2:01 pm
We believed for quite a while that we would be able to implement most of these features without an additional service. However that has not yet come to pass so rather than continue to wait for Amazon we’ve decided to launch the service with a minimal fee to cover our costs. It was never our intent to mislead users. We’ve tried to be very open about our roadmap and plan (far more than most companies), but with that comes the possibility that things don’t end up exactly as planned. The response to the announcement has been very positive overall, so I think we made the right decision to launch the service rather than continue to delay indefinitely.
Safe Home Products said,
December 20, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
The delta update feature addition addresses a critical issue that prevented us from using Jungle Disk as our primary backup solution. We look forward to trying the JD+ code/service. Your workaround to Amazon S3’s limitations is both creative and commendable, and is well worth $1/month.
We used several other online backup solutions before JD. While JD lacked some of the features as others, it is reasonably priced and is stable. If JD+ has the same stability and saves us on bandwidth charges, you have a winner and a long-term client.
Thank you.
-Bill
Jungle Disk » Blog Archive » Jungle Disk 1.49a Beta Released - Including Jungle Disk Plus said,
December 21, 2007 @ 4:28 pm
[...] We’re pleased to announce the release of the Jungle Disk 1.49a Beta, which includes the new Jungle Disk Plus features. You can read the announcement of Jungle Disk Plus in our earlier blog post. [...]
Meridian said,
December 22, 2007 @ 7:29 pm
This is great news, thanks guys! Very very good for those of us with slower connections that tend to #$%$#% fail right near the end when backing up larger files.
But I wonder how you will you deal with extremely large users that put allot of load on your hosted servers, and still only pay a dollar a month, e.g. a company with one account using this to manage terrabytes of data?
Jungle Dave said,
December 23, 2007 @ 12:06 am
@Meridian – We pass on the standard bandwidth costs from Amazon to Jungle Disk Plus users, so we aren’t really put out for heavy users. There is certainly higher server usage from some users than others, but it’s not too significant overall since the bulk of the variable cost (bandwidth) is passed along.
Txoof said,
December 24, 2007 @ 6:56 pm
I would really be interested in using the software that jungledisk is running on their host that enables all of the plus features. That is to say, it would be great if you offered whatever backend software you’re using to make plus work to users.
Many of us run our own hosts in one way or another and would be interested in hosting our own jungledisk plus web service. That would take the burden off of you and keep the license in the “pay once” category instead of the subscription category.
MacMacken said,
December 28, 2007 @ 1:32 am
Speaking of security, is an independent security review of Jungle Disk’s code available?
AES-256 sounds nice but the statement is not very helpful without the source code being open for review or at least a reliable security review …
Jungle Dave said,
December 28, 2007 @ 10:24 am
@MacMacken – we do provide source that demonstrates how the Jungle Disk encryption is performed, which is available at the bottom of the download page. I don’t know that anyone has written a formal “review” of it, but several folks have re-implemented it in other languages, proving that it works as described.
MacMacken said,
December 28, 2007 @ 9:30 pm
http://downloads.jungledisk.com/jungledisk/JungleDiskSourceExample.zip – interesting, thank you!
MacMacken » Datensicherung mit Amazon S3 und Jungle Disk said,
January 8, 2008 @ 2:22 am
[...] Disk» kostet einmalig USD 20, doch wichtige Funktionen zur Datensicherung kann man erst mit «Jungle Disk Plus» für USD 1 im Monat nutzen. «Jungle Disk Plus» ermöglicht den Web-Zugriff auf «Amazon [...]
Jungle Disk » Blog Archive » Jungle Disk 1.50a Released - Including Jungle Disk Plus said,
January 9, 2008 @ 4:44 pm
[...] We’re pleased to announce the release of the Jungle Disk 1.50a, which includes the new Jungle Disk Plus features. You can more about Jungle Disk Plus on our web site and in our announcement blog post. [...]
Mark Hobba said,
March 20, 2008 @ 3:17 am
You said “priced at only $1 per month, which goes directly to support the costs of running the servers” – does the $1 cover the cost of the servers plus a little profit so your company doesn’t go bust? I’m wanting some reassurance that the $1 per month isn’t a ‘loss-leader’ price that will be jacked up to the real cost further down the line?
Jungle Dave said,
March 20, 2008 @ 9:15 am
@Mark – thanks to Amazon EC2, our costs for running these servers are quite low. The $1/month fee more than covers the costs of running and managing the servers. Our business is extremely strong right now and we’ve operated profitably since day one.