Jungle Disk Blog

We’re pleased to announce a new beta release for Jungle Disk 2.5. Unlike our previous betas which included only the Desktop Edition, this release is available for the Workgroup and Reseller editions as well.

We discussed the biggest new features in the 2.49c release in a previous blog post,  the full list of changes since the previous beta is below:

• Native filesystem support on Windows
• Added EU support for Jungle Disk Plus
• Added ability to change username/password on network share for automatic backup
• New prompt for password options for enhanced local security
• Fixed backup log creation with unicode pathnames
• Fixed Jungle Disk service account showing up in user list
• Fixed “service not running” errors on startup

For users still on 2.10, the other new features in the 2.49 beta are:

• Native 64-bit versions for Windows and Linux
• New download resume ability for large file downloads and restores
• Installs and runs as a background service. Will keep running even if Jungle Disk Monitor is closed or logged out.
• Automatic backups are performed even when not logged in to the computer
• Wake from sleep for backups will now be available on Mac in addition to Windows
• Backup in-use files feature will work on Vista without UAC constraints
• Easy backup of data for multiple user accounts on the same computer
• “Time-machine” style restore interface, allowing to you restore files from a point-in-time view of your backup

We’re very excited about the 2.5 release, but want to make sure it gets tested on a wide variety of systems before the final release, especially with the new filesystem support on Windows. If you’d like to try 2.49c, just follow the download links below:

• Desktop Edition beta downloads
• Workgroup Edition beta downloads
• Reseller Edition beta downloads

The Jungle Disk 2.5 beta testing is going well, but we’re not quite done. We’re planning one more beta release in the next few weeks, and there are going to be two new features for you to try.

The first new feature is European support for Jungle Disk Plus. As many of you know, Jungle Disk Plus is built on the Amazon EC2 service, which to date has only been available in the US. Today, Amazon launched EC2 in Europe and we’ve added support in 2.5 for Jungle Disk Plus features including upload resume and block-level updates.  There is no additional charge – European users who are already Jungle Disk Plus subscribers will now be able to use them on their EU buckets in addition to the US. For our European users who aren’t Jungle Disk Plus subscribers, there’s now a great reason to sign up. It’s just $1 per month!

The second feature is one we’ve been promising for a while – native filesystem integration on Windows. Jungle Disk 2.5 will now ship with an optional filesystem driver that allows us to integrate directly with the filesystem, bypassing WebDAV. In the short term, we expect this change to improve compatibility for the drive mapping feature and reduce the number of “Drive Mapping Failed” errors that result from the Microsoft WebDAV service. In the long term, we will use this new filesystem integration method to enhance performance and add additional features. Oh, and did we mention – this now means that drive mapping works on Windows 2000 as well! Mac users, we haven’t fogotten about you. We’re still planning to offer native filesystem integration on Mac as well in a future release. WebDAV on Mac is much more reliable than on Windows or Linux, so we decided to address those platforms first.

Jungle Disk 2.5 will be a free upgrade for all users when released, look out for a beta release with these new features soon!