Jungle Disk Blog

With the release of 3.07, we had a few users report troubles with proxy servers and slow searches for files that needed to be backed up. Before activating the automatic updates, we felt it best to get to the bottom of these issues.

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 made 3.05 available on this site earlier this month, introducing one-way sync, improved backup vault cleanup, and a number of additional improvements. After the release, we continued to get feedback (some from customers already running 3.05) that pointed to a few more items needing our attention.

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).

Today we’re releasing Version 3.05 for all editions of Jungle Disk. A big “thank you” goes out to all of our customers who shared their experiences in our Support Forums and ticket system. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve made a number of performance and usability enhancements, and even added a few new goodies that didn’t appear in 3.04.

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.

It’s really exciting to look back at all of the great things we accomplished at Jungle Disk in 2009, however, we believe that 2010 is our opportunity to do even more great things! We wanted to outline just a couple of the areas that we’re looking to target over the next year.

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!

As 2009 winds to a close, we’re happy to release another set of improvements and bug fixes to all four Jungle Disk Editions. Many thanks go to our excellent user base for sharing their experiences and suggestions with us.

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

Today we’re releasing Version 3.02 for all four editions of Jungle Disk.  This release contains a number of performance and usability enhancements, plus fixes for several issues reported by our users since 3.01 went out.

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

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.

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.