For those who were experiencing 3.07 headaches, Version 3.08 should fix you right up. We’ll plan to switch on those automatic updates next week — so Windows and Mac users who don’t wish to download now, can wait until the software prompts you.

Once again, a big “thank you” goes out to our customers for all of the great feedback!

We don’t like subjecting our customers to overly-frequent version changes, but in this case we felt it best to knock out a few more improvements and get them into the hands of our users. So today, we’re releasing Version 3.06 for each of our product editions. In it, you’ll find even better backup vault cleanup performance, optimized uploading of backup vault database files, and a number of other improvements.

For a complete list of changes, please review our release notes. You can download the new version of your edition from our Download Center.

For the Mac and Windows customers who prefer upgrading with the automatic update feature, we anticipate switching this on for 3.06 later this week (you can select “Check for Updates” from Jungle Disk’s Help Menu to see if the new version is available).

One notable enhancement is the addition of a “One Way” option to our Sync capabilities. With this feature, you can sync files from your network drive to your local folder (or vice-versa), without a requirement that the synchronization happens in the opposite direction. This feature is useful when you know the master copy of a document always exists in once place or the other, and you want to overwrite copies with the master version (regardless of whether the copies changed or not). Be sure to read the release notes on this feature, so you can set it up with exactly the behavior you want.

Other enhancements include improved cleanup of deleted data in Backup Vaults, and support for Growl and Snarl messages in Windows (and similar notifications in Linux). Linux customers will be happy to find that we restored the command-line utility that existed in versions prior to 3.0.

For a complete list of changes, please review our release notes.

You can download the new version of your edition from our Download Center — and we plan to enable automatic updates early next week. Once we do, Windows and Mac customers can upgrade to the new version by selecting “Check for Updates” from Jungle Disk’s Help Menu.

Collaboration
We love that you trust Jungle Disk to backup and store your valuable files, but now we want to empower you to do more by offering cool new features like collaboration tools and public file sharing.  At the end of the day, Jungle Disk is going to be the complete solution for any individual, team or company looking to do just about anything with their data. Store it? Archive it? Back it up? Version it? Share it? Sync it? Collaborate with it? Access it through the web? Yes, Jungle Disk does that.

Usability
We’re going to make a big push to improve product usability across the board. That means a rework of our existing offering and also putting more thought into usability as we roll out new features.  Certainly, our efforts to improve usability applies not only to the software, but the Jungle Disk website as well.

What else?
Rest assured that we have a lot of awesome things to roll out over 2010!  In addition to a host of new features and improvements for all of Jungle Disk’s products and services, you’ll want to keep coming back to find out more about how we’re taking your ability to store, sync, access and share your data to the max!

It’s been more than a year now since the Rackspace acquisition of Jungle Disk, and I’m extremely proud of the progress that we’ve made since then. The team has more than tripled in size and continues to expand. We’ve released several major product updates and two entirely new products, and Jungle Disk is now available through Rackspace Email & Apps to the entire range of Rackspace customers. My role has changed over the past year as well as I’ve transferred responsibility for engineering and business operations to others at Jungle Disk and started exploring the other divisions of Rackspace.

Working with the Rackspace Cloud group, I’ve gained exposure to some of the unique challenges faced by large scale cloud operators like Rackspace, challenges that will be encountered by many hosting providers and large enterprises going forward as more and more IT services move to cloud architectures. The technologist in me is excited about the groundbreaking technology required to solve these challenges, while the entrepreneur in me sees a big opportunity to make both public and private clouds faster, more reliable, and easier to manage.  And so it is that I leave Jungle Disk in capable hands to pursue my next venture.

I’m grateful for the amazing support of Jungle Disk’s customers over the years, and more than anything I’m proud of the community that has been built around the software. The future of Jungle Disk is bright and you’ll be hearing more about those plans soon. As for me, I am and will always remain @jungledave.

Additionally, Amazon S3 EU (Ireland) storage pricing has been reduced 15% to $0.15 per GB.  They are also reducing Request prices from $0.012 to $0.010 per 10,000 GET requests or 1,000 PUT requests.

These pricing changes will be reflected in your next statement.  Enjoy this early holiday gift from AWS!

The complete set of changes can be found in the release notes, and we’ve turned on automatic updates for Mac and Windows users. Linux users (and those who prefer to update manually) can visit our downloads page. Note that we didn’t release 3.03 for general availability, so most of you will upgrade from 3.02 to 3.04.

All of us at Jungle Disk want to wish all of you a warm and happy holiday season, and a joyous New Year. We look forward to meeting your cloud storage needs for many years to come!

Jungle Allan

One notable enhancement is our new “Usage Information” screen for Backup Vaults (see the screenshot below).  Several of you have asked for additional details on what comprises your backup vaults, and we’re happy to oblige.  You can run this report on your own vaults by clicking the link at the bottom of the Backup Vault configuration page.

You can download the new version of your edition from our Download Center — we plan to enable automatic updates early next week. Once we do, Windows and Mac users can upgrade to the new version by selecting “Check for Updates” from Jungle Disk’s Help Menu.

Jungle Disk's Backup Vault Usage Screen

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.

• 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.