Jungle Disk Blog

A minor update for all of our products is now available. Jungle Disk 3.01 fixes several issues that were found since the initial release of 3.00. We normally would wait a bit longer before releasing a minor update, however we wanted to make sure these fixes were available before enabling automatic updates.

You can download the new version from our Download Center. The release notes for each product are linked from the download page. We’ve enabled automatic updates, so you should also be able to update on Windows/Mac by selecting Check for Updates from the Help menu.

Also, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve taken the new Jungle Disk web interface out of beta. Jungle Disk Desktop and Workgroup users can now access the new interface via https://www.myjungledisk.com. Workgroup users can also use their workgroup domain, although it is no longer required.

SUWANEE, GA, November 17, 2009 – Today Jungle Disk, LLC, a subsidiary of Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX – News), announced the release of Jungle Disk Server Edition, the newest addition to the Jungle Disk product line that gives small to midsize businesses an automated and affordable way to back up servers in the cloud. Jungle Disk continues to provide security and flexibility to its customers by utilizing AES-256 encryption with an additional user-controlled key and by providing a choice in cloud storage providers. Additionally, Jungle Disk offers customers an unlimited amount of storage with a unique pay-as-you-go pricing of only $0.15 per gigabyte.

Jungle Disk Server Edition builds on the core storage technology of the Jungle Disk product line, and offers an entirely new backup engine designed from the ground up for handling large, complex backup jobs. And the immediate, Internet-based accessibility of backed-up files on Server Edition allows users to transfer data back to servers, helping to maintain business productivity even in the event of a server crash or hard drive failure.

With this launch, Jungle Disk now offers a full portfolio of business products that address the backup and storage needs of both small and midsize businesses.

“We have always tried to work collaboratively with our customers to enhance and continually improve our products with the features to boost productivity and give peace of mind that files and data are secure, protected and readily accessible,” said Dave Wright, founder, Jungle Disk, LLC. “Today we are expanding our portfolio with two new products, and adding a number of enhancements to our existing Desktop and Workgroup products that both underscore our commitment to innovation and build on services that our customers trust for their data.”

Systems administrator at Stauffer Glove and Safety Ed Crotty has been testing the beta of Jungle Disk Server Edition for backing up Stauffer’s systems remotely. As the product becomes generally available, he plans to expand the use of Server Edition to back up additional servers and keep off-site data encrypted.

“As a fourth-generation-owned business that has been in existence for more than 100 years, minding the matters of the company is something that is taken very seriously,” said Crotty. “We looked at multiple solutions, and the ones with the best balance of price and performance are always at the top of the list in any technical decision. Therefore, Jungle Disk Server Edition made a lot of sense to us. We trust Jungle Disk for protecting and keeping our business data secure.”

Product Availability

Jungle Disk also announced enhancements to Jungle Disk Workgroup and Desktop Editions, as well as a new back-up only service, Simply Backup. Jungle Disk products are available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. To purchase or obtain more information, see http://www.jungledisk.com.

Rackspace Cloud Drive and Rackspace Server Backup, powered by Jungle Disk, were also announced today. These services are ideal for businesses that already use or plan to use cloud-based Rackspace Email or Microsoft Exchange services, and want to add file sharing and online backup. For more information, see http://www.rackspace.com/apps.

About Jungle Disk, LLC

Jungle Disk, LLC, a subsidiary of Rackspace Hosting, provides an extremely flexible way to backup, store, sync and share files online. Providing solutions for IT professionals and enthusiasts, Jungle Disk’s storage, backup and access solutions are available to organizations of all sizes and its unlimited storage capacity can grow as its customers’ businesses grow.

About Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing and is ranked #43 on FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to work for in the United States. The company provides its customers Fanatical Support® in their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected releases, development, performance or market acceptance associated with our products and services, including our New Server Backup for Businesses; anticipated operational and financial benefits from our products and services, including our New Server Backup for Businesses; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits from our products and services may not materialize because our product or service is not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market our products cost effectively, differentiate the product from competitive products or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with our products or services, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect benefits associated with our products or services, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the product, and (vi) and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2009, filed with the SEC on November 12, 2009. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

Today is the biggest launch in Jungle Disk history! We’re officially launching two new products and major updates for our two current products, as well as an entirely new website and logo. Here’s what’s new:

• Jungle Disk Desktop Edition 3.0: A major update to our premier personal storage product, Jungle Disk Desktop 3.0 adds Sync and an entirely new backup engine that is faster and more efficient than ever.
• Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition 3.0: Our online storage product for small businesses and teams gains Sync support, our new backup engine, and administrator feature control.
• Jungle Disk Simply Backup: An entirely new product for home users that are looking for simple, secure, and reliable backup for their important personal files.
• Jungle Disk Server Edition: Built from the ground up for the demands of large scale server backup, Jungle Disk Server Edition makes it easy to remotely manage backups and restores for Windows and Linux servers from any desktop.

Covering everything that is new in these releases is too much for one blog post. If you’d like to know more about the new products and features, please read our previous announcement posts:

• Jungle Disk Desktop / Workgroup 3.0 Announcement
• Jungle Disk Server Edition Announcement
• Jungle Disk Simply Backup Announcement

As always, upgrades are free for current customers.  Automatic update notifications will be turned on later this week, but for existing customers (including beta users) who want to upgrade to the latest versions now, you can download them from our new Download section. Before upgrading, you should read through the Release Notes which are linked from the download page. They cover common questions and give an overview of what you need to know about the new features in this release.

There are a few items covered in the release notes that we want to highlight here as well:

• Server Edition beta customers on Linux will need to reset your license key (and update your jungledisk-license.xml file with the new key) after updating to the final release.
• The 3.0 Desktop and Workgroup products on Mac now require OSX 10.5 or higher. The Sync feature requires an API only present in Leopard, and only a tiny percentage of our Mac users are still on 10.4. Existing users on 10.4 can continue to use Jungle Disk 2.62.
• The new Backup Vault feature in Desktop and Workgroup stores backups in an entirely new format that utilizes compression and de-duplication for high efficiency. The existing Network Drive-based backup feature is still present in 3.0 under the “Legacy Backup” settings. If you want to move from Legacy Backup to a Backup Vault your data will be re-uploaded into the Backup Vault. For detailed instructions see this KB article.
• We’ve made some pricing changes, however they only affect new subscriptions – current subscription prices are not affected.

We’ve got a lot of great stuff happening this week, including the planned launch of the new Jungle Disk Server Edition and Jungle Disk Simply Backup products, the release of Jungle Disk 3.0 Desktop and Workgroup Editions, as well as a whole new website redesign. As part of this rollout, we are making some changes to our pricing structure that I wanted to explain here first.

Before I get into the specific pricing, I want to make it clear that this pricing only applies to new subscriptions. We’re not changing pricing on existing subscriptions retroactively and have no plans to do so going forward.

After the 3.0 rollout, the pricing for new Jungle Disk subscriptions will be:

• Jungle Disk Simply Backup: $2/month, with 5GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Desktop Edition: $3/month, with 5GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition: $4/month, with 10GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Server Edition: $5/month, with 10GB of free storage

Although prices are increasing for Desktop and Workgroup edition, we’re including free Cloud Files or managed Amazon S3 storage that mostly offsets the pricing difference. The free storage is pooled across the entire account, so if you have multiple Workgroup or Server subscriptions the included storage can be used by any of your computers.

So why are we changing prices, and why include free storage with each subscription? There were several reasons for making the change:

• We’re beefing up our support operation, moving from 5 day a week business hour support to 7 day a week business hour support. We plan to expand support options further going forward. The new pricing structure helps us ensure we can continue to improve our support for all customers.
• We’ve found that many less technically savvy users have no idea how much online storage space they will need. Often times the only point of reference is that their computer has a 500GB or 1TB hard drive, so they think the service is more expensive than it really is. In reality, most Jungle Disk users have 10GB of storage or less. By including a healthy amount of free storage we help casual computer users better understand the amount of space they may expect to use.
• Many Workgroup administrators have complained about lack of predictable monthly costs for the service, due to the variable pricing on storage. While this change doesn’t eliminate that, it helps control it for many situations. We’re looking at offering quota support and other features in the future to give Workgroup admins more control over their storage costs.

While changing prices is never an easy decision, it’s important for us to have a pricing structure in place going forward that keeps the business healthy and addresses the needs of both customers and the business.

Jungle Disk has always attracted a technically savvy user who has a good understanding of storage concepts like backup, network drives, and sync. While most competing online storage services offer just one of those features, we’re proud that our software is unique in its ability to combine all three features in a single product and user interface.  However, we recognize that robust feature set and perceived complexity turns off some potential users – and, makes our customers hesitant to recommend the software to less tech savvy friends and family.

Online backup is critical for all computer users today with the growth of digital personal assets – pictures, music, and files. To help address the needs of a more casual computer user, we are introducing Jungle Disk Simply Backup. As the name implies, Simply Backup is a new version of Jungle Disk for home users who just need a simple, secure, and inexpensive online backup service. The Simply Backup software is built on the same core backup engine that underlies Jungle Disk Desktop, Workgroup, and Server Editions but eliminates the complexity of supporting multiple online disks and network drives.

As with our Desktop Edition software, Simply Backup supports multiple computers at no additional cost, making it a very compelling option for multi-PC households versus other online backup services that charge per computer. If a user decides to move to the full Jungle Disk Desktop Edition in the future, the process is simple and all their data moves with them.

Pricing and availability for Jungle Disk Simply Backup will be announced soon.

One of the features we’ve mentioned several times in the new backup engine that powers Jungle Disk Server Edition (and is also present in Desktop/Workgroup 3.0) is “extended filesystem metadata backup”. But what exactly does that mean?

The previous versions of Jungle Disk focused on backing up your file data, which is the most important part of your files. On Mac, we also backed up resource forks which are a method of storing additional data alongside a file. However on modern filesystems, there is a lot more than just file data on your filesystem. There is lots of metadata information that goes along with your files and can be important to backup and restore in many situations. One example is security information – most desktop users don’t really know about file ownership, security information, and ACLs, but on servers that type of information is important and if lost it could lead to a security leak or permission issues. On multi-user Desktop systems it can be important as well to prevent other users from getting access to your files.

The new Backup Vaults in Jungle Disk 3.0 were designed from the outset to be able to backup and restore virtually any type of filesystem metadata information. Among the metadata that we can backup and restore:

On Windows:

• NTFS alternate streams
• File creation, modification, and access time
• File attributes like compression, hidden, and system files
• File and directory ACLs and ownership information
• Junction points, symlinks, and hardlinks

On Linux:

• File and directory owner, group, and permissions
• Symlinks and hardlinks
• File modification, and access time
• xattr attributes, including ACLs
• Devices nodes and other special files

And on Mac? Well, let’s say that Mac is among the most difficult systems to backup and restore correctly. Fortunately there is a great tool called Backup Bouncer that can be used to verify metadata backup and restore for Mac backup software. I’ll let the output of that tool speak for itself:

Legacy backup and restore from Jungle Disk 2.62:

Verifying:    basic-permissions ... FAIL (Critical)
Verifying:           timestamps ... FAIL (Critical)
Verifying:             symlinks ... FAIL (Critical)
Verifying:    symlink-ownership ... FAIL
Verifying:            hardlinks ... FAIL (Important)
Verifying:       resource-forks ...
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok (Critical)
   Sub-test:  on hardlinked files ... FAIL (Important)
Verifying:         finder-flags ... FAIL (Critical)
Verifying:         finder-locks ... FAIL
Verifying:        creation-date ... FAIL
Verifying:            bsd-flags ... FAIL
Verifying:       extended-attrs ...
   Sub-test:             on files ... FAIL (Important)
   Sub-test:       on directories ... FAIL (Important)
   Sub-test:          on symlinks ... FAIL
Verifying: access-control-lists ...
   Sub-test:             on files ... FAIL (Important)
   Sub-test:              on dirs ... FAIL (Important)
Test dir '/Users/mrhodes/Desktop/bbouncer/backup-bouncer-0.2.0/Src/90-fifo' does not exist
Test dir '/Users/mrhodes/Desktop/bbouncer/backup-bouncer-0.2.0/Src/95-devices' does not exist
Verifying:          combo-tests ...
   Sub-test:  xattrs + rsrc forks ... FAIL
   Sub-test:     lots of metadata ... FAIL

Backup Vault backup and restore from Jungle Disk 3.0:

Verifying:    basic-permissions ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:           timestamps ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:             symlinks ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:    symlink-ownership ... ok
Verifying:            hardlinks ... ok (Important)
Verifying:       resource-forks ...
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok (Critical)
   Sub-test:  on hardlinked files ... ok (Important)
Verifying:         finder-flags ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:         finder-locks ... ok
Verifying:        creation-date ... ok
Verifying:            bsd-flags ... ok
Verifying:       extended-attrs ...
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok (Important)
   Sub-test:       on directories ... ok (Important)
   Sub-test:          on symlinks ... ok
Verifying: access-control-lists ...
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok (Important)
   Sub-test:              on dirs ... ok (Important)
Verifying:                 fifo ... ok
Verifying:              devices ... ok
Verifying:          combo-tests ...
   Sub-test:  xattrs + rsrc forks ... ok
   Sub-test:     lots of metadata ... ok

That’s a bit better! There are only a few Mac local backup products that can pass the full Backup Bouncer test (Time Machine doesn’t even pass it). To my knowledge, Jungle Disk 3.0 is the only online backup product that passes every test, something the Jungle Disk Mac team can be proud of.

Now when you backup with Jungle Disk, you know you’re getting the whole enchilada, not just the filling!

We’re coming down the home stretch and are releasing a second Release Candidate version of Jungle Disk 3.0 Desktop, Workgroup, and Server Editions. A number of issues that were found in the last release candidate have been fixed in this version. You can find a detailed list of changes in the Desktop & Workgroup Edition Release Notes, or the Server Edition Release Notes. We recommend all existing beta testers upgrade to the new Release Candidate release, and any of existing users who haven’t tried the beta but want to get an early look at 3.0 should try the new versions now!

You can download the new release candidate (2.96a) below:

• Jungle Disk Desktop Edition Beta Download
• Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition Beta Download
• Jungle Disk Server Edition Beta Download

We’ll also be turning on automatic updates for beta customers today (this will only offer the update to customers already running a beta/RC version).

If you experience any issues running the Release Candidate, please post to our Desktop/Workgroup beta forum or Server Edition beta forum.

Think all we do is sit around cranking Starbuck’s and Red Bull and extolling the virtues of the cloud while working all night? Don’t say that to Scott Gibson and Jamie Painter – Jungle Disk’s resident soon to be Iron Man and marathoner, respectively. Both of these brave souls have events coming up, so we thought we’d wish them luck here and tell you a little about them.

Scott, our VP of Operations, is in Florida for his first full Ironman competition this weekend. For the uninitiated of you, that’s a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 110-mile bike ride, followed by a 26.2 mile marathon run. And get this – he only started doing this stuff 6 months ago! Here’s a little of what Scott had to say when we sat down with him (okay, he insisted on standing) and asked a few questions:

What on earth motivated you to do this?  In my life, I’ve been lucky to achieve my goals in terms of education, family life, and career. The only thing I hadn’t achieved was my goal of being physically fit and in great health. My solution was to create a goal so big and tell everyone I was doing it so I had no excuse, so I chose the Ironman. Six months later, I’m 35 pounds lighter and in the best shape of my life.

How much are you training?  I train around 12 hours a week.

Any downsides to your new regimen?  Yeah, all of my pants are too big for me. I need to do some shopping!

Jamie Painter handles Linux development and builds here at Jungle Disk and is headed to the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Antonio Marathon on November 15. Here’s a little of what Jamie had to say:

Dude, why? Are you nuts?    Two years ago I realized (with the help of some professional photos) that I was no longer able to effectively suck in my gut. I’ve always been a person who strives to achieve things others believe are out of reach, so I chose a marathon as my goal. When my friends told me I was nuts, I knew I’d found a worthy goal. Now I’m 50 pounds lighter and setting my sights on a triathlon.

How much are you training?   I’ve been training for this race for four months. I do about 35 miles per week. My longest training run is 20 miles, and I’ll do that a total of three times before the race.

What have you learned from all this (other than that you’re a glutton for punishment)?   I’ve learned that the human body is really remarkable in its ability when it’s taken care of and fueled properly. I also now believe that any able-bodied person can run a marathon if he or she wishes to do it and is willing to put in the time or effort.

Want to split this case of PBR with me?   Talk to me after November 15.

Break a leg, Scott and Jamie! (wait, that’s only in show biz.) Good luck!

Testing of the Jungle Disk Desktop/Workgroup 3.0 and Server Editon releases continues to go well and today we’re pleased to make “release candidate” versions available for download. These versions address all of our outstanding issues and we do not expect any major changes between now and the final releases.

This release (2.95a) includes a large number of fixes and improvements, particularly in performance and robustness. You can find a detailed list of changes in the Desktop & Workgroup Edition Release Notes, or the Server Edition Release Notes. We recommend all existing beta testers upgrade to the Release Candidate release, and any of existing users who haven’t tried the beta but want to get an early look at 3.0 should try the new versions now!

One immediately obvious (but purely cosmetic) change you’ll notice in this release is our new logo and icon. We’re getting ready to re-vamp our website design for the final release and have a new logo and color scheme to go with it. I’m not going to spoil the surprise here – you’ll have to check out the software if you want a sneak peek.

You can download the new release candidate (2.95a) below:

• Jungle Disk Desktop Edition Beta Download
• Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition Beta Download
• Jungle Disk Server Edition Beta Download

We’ll also be turning on automatic updates for beta customers today (this will only offer the update to customers already running a beta version).

If you experience any issues running the Release Candidate, please post to our Desktop/Workgroup beta forum or Server Edition beta forum.