A few months back Amazon made an update to allow you to change your AWS Secret Key on demand. By default, Jungle Disk encrypts files using your AWS Secret Key (this can be changed to a custom key in the encryption options). Note that if you use the default setting and later change your AWS Secret Key, you need to keep a copy of your previous key in the decryption keys list in Encryption Options. This will allow you to decrypt files that were uploaded using your old key. You should also keep a copy of the key in a safe place in case you need to re-install the software. We’ve posted a reminder about this on our Encryption help page.

Try as we might, a few annoying bugs slipped in to the 1.40 release. Rather than wait till the next scheduled release to fix them, we’re releasing a minor update to correct the issues. You can get it now from the download page.
The primary issues fixed in this release include:

• Cancel not working or giving odd behavior for background uploads
• Directory caching preventing changes made on one machine from showing up on another
• Timeout during copy / rename of large files using fast file copy

You can see the full details in the release notes.

A quick note on using Jungle Disk to share files between multiple machines. The default cache settings in Jungle Disk make it so that changes made on one machine will not likely show up on another machine for 2-3 minutes. Furthermore, Mac Finder has its own caching and in some cases you may need to remount the volume (using the Jungle Disk menu option) in order for new files to appear. If you want changes to show up faster, you can modify the CacheCheckInterval setting in the jungledisk-settings.ini file (currently this setting is not available in the configuration UI). Simply change the value (in seconds) to reduce the length of time that Jungle Disk waits to check for changes to cached data.

The next beta release of Jungle Disk, which should be available tomorrow pending final testing, adds a raft of features including fast file renaming and copying. As many Jungle Disk users are aware, moving or renaming files with the current version of Jungle Disk can be a painful process. Because S3 does not allow objects to be renamed in-place once uploaded, moving or renaming a file requires it to be re-uploaded which takes time and can cost money as well since S3 charges for data transfers. While we still hope that Amazon will remove this limitation in the future, we’ve decided to put an interim solution in place to remove this headache and the associated costs.

To enable fast file renaming and copying, we’ve placed servers in Amazon.com datacenters using their EC2 service. When you need to rename, move, or copy a file on your Jungle Disk a request is sent to these servers with the old and new names. The EC2 server will copy the data from the old name to the new name without the data ever leaving the Amazon data center. This means that it not only occurs quickly, but you aren’t charged any bandwidth for the operation. The request sent from Jungle Disk to the servers is signed such that only that specific operation can be performed. In addition, the file data stays encrypted at all times during the transfer, and stays completely within Amazon’s internal network. Your secret key and encryption keys are never sent out of your machine.

This is the first of several features on our roadmap that will make use of Amazon’s EC2 servers. The ability to host services from within Amazon’s datacenters enables us to provide all kinds of functionality that would otherwise be impossible with the basic S3 API. However, if for any reason you’d prefer to not have your Jungle Disk client interact with these EC2 servers, the fast rename feature (as well as future EC2-enabled features) can easily be turned off in the options. In addition, should the Jungle Disk EC2 servers be unavailable for any reason, the Jungle Disk software will gracefully fall back to the old rename method.