To Our Jungle Disk Customers: We Apologize. And We’re (Finally) Back.

jungledisk · November 30, 2012 at 1:01 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

 

First, an apology

We have not engaged with you in quite some time. We could make excuses for why this happened, but the truth is we lost our focus with you, our valued Jungle Disk customers. For this, we are truly sorry. The good news is that things are going to change.

 

So, what have we been up to?

The past 18 months have been a pivotal period for Rackspace, Jungle Disk’s parent company. Rackspace launched its open cloud platform, powered by OpenStack, taking a huge step towards a vision of an open cloud future that eliminates the fear of vendor lock-in. As part of this effort, we are rebuilding the Jungle Disk technology from the ground up and recently released the first iteration of this new platform: Rackspace Cloud Backup. Today, this provides Rackspace customers a more usable and scalable way to backup their Cloud Servers.

During this period we did a poor job of communicating with you about the new technologies Rackspace was building, which would drive greater value for customers over time.

 

Future for Jungle Disk

As of November 2012, we have a new team in charge of Jungle Disk and a vision for the future that aligns us with our parent, Rackspace. We are re-engaging with our customers, and are eager to hear your concerns and suggestions.

We recognize it may take time to regain some customers’ trust and loyalty, but that journey begins today and I’m excited to lead the charge.

During 2013, we plan to release new versions of server and workstation backup to Jungle Disk customers. These products will be based on the awesome new technology that powers server backup in the Rackspace open cloud. Going forward, our primary focus will be on solutions targeted at serving the needs of business customers of all sizes —the same customers Rackspace serves so well today. We are renewing our commitment to current customers and while we believe the new products will delight everyone, we will help find the right solution for those who don’t feel our new platform is right for them.

In the meantime, if you have had an issue with Jungle Disk where the resolution was not to your satisfaction, we invite you to contact us at support@jungledisk.com. We’ve committed additional resources to clear up all outstanding issues.

 

More to come and a call to action

Over the coming weeks and months you can expect to hear a lot more from us. We are reaching out to half of our customer base now to ask a single question: “Would you recommend Jungle Disk to a friend or colleague?” We want to gauge how our customers feel today and set a baseline from which we can improve. We will use this blog to communicate more detail on our product and the cloud backup market.

We want to hear from you, our customers. We encourage you to share your thoughts with us at feedback@jungledisk.com. It may take some time to respond to all of the feedback, but we will work to respond to every submission.

 

Thank you for your loyalty.

 

Huw Edwards

General Manager, Jungle Disk

huw@jungledisk.com

 

  • Charles

    Like many, I’m a regular S3 JD Desktop user. I have no interest in new software or Rackspace technologies.The current software works well, it just needs updating.

    Will you be adding Amazon RRS and Glacier support to the current or future software?

    Will Amazon S3 continue to be supported in your new software?

    I’m somewhat concerned that you did not mention Amazon at all in your blog post.

    Thanks

    • huw_jungledisk

      Our goal is to provide customers with a choice of storage clouds. As such we intend to continue to support Amazon S3 as a storage target.

      We don’t currently have plans to offer RRS or Glacier support but we would like to understand your use case for wanting them (aside from simply cheaper storage). Are you looking to store data in Jungle disk that you would be happy with a lower level of redundancy? Or are you looking at archiving data that you don’t expect to need to retrieve in a short period of time?

      • http://www.facebook.com/gregorywiner Gregory Winer

        Huw, first of all – your team makes a great product – keep up the good work! I’ve been a customer for many years, and count on Jungledisk to protect my life’s work and creative materials. You should always remember that your company has an awesome responsibility for protecting many people’s digital lives: their intellectual and creative materials.

        One of the key advantages to the platform, is it’s openness, and I think it is a valuable differentiator to allow the platform to support multiple back-end storage services.

        Use cases for each storage back-end can vary, but what Jungledisk can facilitate is that transparent view across the various capabilities.

        In the case of Glacier support, it is a tremendous value to those who use JD for backup purposes. In most normal backup circumstances, 3-5 hour recall time, and 1% or less retrieval frequency, the economics are extremely compelling. Like 80% less expensive compelling. You can’t argue with that kind of savings when you’re backing up TB’s of digital media that is infrequently recalled.

        We look forward to seeing the changes coming, and hope that “open” means a truly agnostic view of the storage and processing cloud market.

        • Huw Edwards

          Greg, thanks for your feedback and comments. Our goal is to be open and to provide choice. That doesn’t mean we will support every storage option out there but we will evaluate the options out there.

  • Michael

    Glad to finally hear from you. Unfortunately, this may be a case of too little too late: you’ve lost me as a Jungledisk customer – since you appeared to have abandoned your customers and put the business into autopilot mode, I have been investigating alternatives, and just signed up for a year of CrashPlan. As soon as my initial upload occurs, I’m done here. (Their Black Friday promotion certainly didn’t hurt, but it just gave me the push to finally jump – if I had been satisfied here, I wouldn’t have switched, since time for initial upload on any new cloud backup system is a substantial barrier to entry.)

    My particular issues with Jungledisk have been the poor performance and clunky design of the Mac client. An automated backup solution that grinds your computer to a halt every time it runs isn’t particularly useful. Jungledisk’s client is a performance nightmare – when it starts scanning for changed files on my (newish but non-SSD) Mac, it does *something* that hits the filesystem and/or Spotlight so hard that applications won’t launch and new Finder windows won’t open for up to several minutes.

    Add to that the poor aesthetics, and, more importantly, clunky UI of the client, compared with Crashplan, and that service’s extra features and time-based rather than data-size-based pricing, and I was sold.

    Best of luck on your new path – I sincerely hope you can make it succeed, so there continue to be strong competitors in this area.

    • huw_jungledisk

      We are sorry to lose you as a customer but we take on board your comments and feedback on the product. We will work hard to make improvements to the product and maybe in the future our offering will be compelling enough to win you back.

  • Peter

    I was just looking around for another backup provider (true!), so this is interesting news. I’d like a clear answer on how you look at security?

    Colin Percival claims that there are several security issues in the JungleDisk service. See this post for details: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-06-03-insecurity-in-the-jungle.html

    • huw_jungledisk

      We appreciate your questions and I’d like to engage with you to discuss your concerns.

  • Davey126

    I would not recommend Jungle Disk at this time due to multiple missed development targets (some would say broken promises) and the inexcusable lack of customer communication during the hiatus. That could change going forward but it will take time to regain confidence in the product. The ball is in your court.

    • huw_jungledisk

      Yes, the ball is very much in our court. We recognize we have a lot to overcome and the proof will be in what we deliver over the coming months. Doing that well is what will be needed to regain the trust of customers like yourself.

  • Ben Bowtell

    After moving my desktop backups away from you due to your inactivity it’s nice to see there still somebody behind my server backups!

    • huw_jungledisk

      There certainly is someone still behind backup products for both servers and workstations. Hopefully we can prove this to you in time and re-win the business you moved away from us.

  • http://www.a-lites.com A-Lites

    I think this is great news. I would like to know if pricing will be affected as this would be my major concern. Also will Jungledisk users get phone support like rackspace? We have continued to use jungledisk for our clients as it just works. However features like seed loading from faster connections and block level whole server backup would be fantastic additions. Also backing up of large datasets as we have clients in the 1tb areas.

    Thank you for the update and look forward to more news. In answer to your questioned now you are “alive” yes we would look at recommending jungledisk with renewed confidence.

    p.s. fix the broken image to post this ;)

    • huw_jungledisk

      Yes, when we release the new products we intend to provide phone support for them. We are not staffed/resourced to a level where we can deliver that to Jungle Disk customers today but it’s a goal we are working toward and we appreciate your patience as we move in that direction.

      We’d love to engage with you directly on your product suggestions. I’ll send you an email to discuss further. It’s great to hear you are a promoter of the product!

  • Mike P

    I heard this EXACT story a year ago. I trusted your reps at the time. Not again.

    • huw_jungledisk

      I can understand you feeling this way. The proof will be in whether we deliver on this renewed promise. We will work hard at it and hopefully we can win you back when we have results to show.

  • http://thebankwatch.com/ Colin Henderson

    I am afraid its too little too late for me too. I moved to SpiderOak earlier this year after evaluating the alternatives. For the record I used JD for 6 years, and it saw me through many new laptops/ restores etc.

    The best thing you can do is prove that you are back with consistency. Then we will see.

    • huw_jungledisk

      That is precisely our goal – to show consistency in support, customer engagement and new product offerings. If we do that then we may have a chance at winning back previously loyal customers like yourself. The proof will be in the delivery

  • huw

    @Charles

    Our goal is to provide customers with a choice of storage clouds. As such we intend to continue to support Amazon S3 as a storage target.

    We don’t currently have plans to offer RRS or Glacier support but we would like to understand your use case for wanting them (aside from simply cheaper storage). Are you looking to store data in Jungle disk that you would be happy with a lower level of redundancy? Or are you looking at archiving data that you don’t expect to need to retrieve in a short period of time?

  • huw

    @Michael

    We are sorry that to lose you as a customer but we take on board your comments and feedback on the product.

  • huw

    @ Peter

    We appreciate your questions and I’d like to engage with you to discuss your concerns.

  • huw

    @Davey126

    Yes, the ball is very much in our court. We recognize we have a lot to overcome and the proof will be in what we deliver over the coming months. Doing that well is what will be needed to regain trust of customers like yourself.

  • huw

    @Ben Bowtell

    There certainly is someone still behind backup products for both servers and workstations. Hopefully we can prove this to you in time and re-win the business you moved away from us.

  • Yohan

    Is the new version of the workstation/server backup going to be a downloadable executable that installs on our machine, as it is currently?

    2 years ago the talk was of going to an online platform and doing away with the tradutuonal software.

    • huw

      @Yohan

      The new version will continue to have a small software agent which needs to be installed on your server/workstation. However, we have a new web-based control panel that was built for speed and simplicity. From this control panel you can schedule, manage, or restore files. It’s easy to choose specific files and folders to back up and specify when and at what frequency to perform each created backup. We believe this is a huge step forward from the control panel in Jungle Disk today which has to be managed locally.

  • huw

    @A-Lites

    Yes, when we release the new products we intend to provide phone support for them. We are not staffed/resourced to a level where we can deliver that to Jungle Disk customers today but it’s a goal we are working toward and we appreciate your patience as we move in that direction.

    We’d love to engage with you directly on your product suggestions. I’ll send you an email to discuss further. It’s great to hear you are a promoter of the product!

  • huw

    @Mike P

    I can understand you feeling this way. The proof will be in whether we deliver on this renewed promise. We will work hard at it and hopefully we can win you back when we have results to show.

  • huw

    @Colin Henderson

    That is precisely our goal – to show consistency in support, customer engagement and new product offerings. If we do that then we may have a chance at winning back previously loyal customers like yourself. The proof will be in the delivery.

  • http://www.hireahit.com/ Dave Warren

    Short of Glacier support, I’m just not interested.

    The cost difference is huge, I’ve got tons of data that will only get restored in the event of critical hardware failure. By the time I have new hardware shipped and get it racked up and online and wait the 3-7 days it will take to download, the extra few hours to start the backup won’t even matter.

    I’d still want the option to use traditional storage options as some data is critical enough to want available on a moment’s notice.

    Even better would be the option to keep current data on S3 and age blocks out to Glacier.

    • huw_jungledisk

      I appreciate the feedback and accept that Glacier has its uses. As you are probably aware there are hidden costs with Glacier when it comes to restoring your data. Unfortunately for you we don’t currently plan to support it. We recognize that is not going to please some customers and understand that they may choose an alternative backup provider instead.

  • CA

    Security, Security, Security – use the workgroup sync, and for the most part have been happy. Have occasional disconnection problems that I tried to work with support on prior to all comms going away, but still have never been able to totally prevent disconnects.

    Have been reviewing spideroak. As far as I am concerned, NOTHING is more important than the security issues. If this link that @Peter put above http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-06-03-insecurity-in-the-jungle.html is correct, there are issues that you must address. My level of understanding is not at the right level to comment or help you on this issue. However, high security is the absolute main reason why I choose one cloud sync provider over another.

    • huw_jungledisk

      Security is a top priority. As part of my taking over Jungle Disk we are conducting a thorough security review and acting on the results to address any weaknesses or issues.

  • JBroome

    Your service has been reliable and the backups on my macbook and macbook pro have been completing like they always have.

    I don’t need JungleDisk to hold my hand and contact me every week to remind me they’re around.

    Sure, the mac client isn’t pretty, but I use it so infrequently to change what is getting backed up I don’t care what it looks like.

    As long as my data is safe and gets uploaded that’s all I’m worried about.

    Thanks Jungle Disk.

    • huw_jungledisk

      Thanks! We appreciate you as a customer and aim to continue to serve your needs.

  • tom

    No Glacier support = Not good enough.
    Plan to abandon JD at some point.

    • huw_jungledisk

      We’re sorry you feel that way but given we don’t plan to support Glacier we understand if you decide to go with another provider who does.

  • http://vacilando.org Tomáš Fülöpp

    Perhaps useful to link to http://support.jungledisk.com/entries/21895207-add-support-for-amazon-glacier — one of those frustrating and fruitless requests for a feature which should have been an automatic and natural one to be implemented many months ago.

    Rackspace, I guess I speak for many if I say that you are killing an excellent project and piece of software by dragging your feet and by your awkward attempts to steer away from Amazon’s storage.

  • chris

    I think Glacier support is a must have feature for JD, as an option for long-term backup of files that I do not anticipate needing access to except in the event of local data loss. Reason is that it is substantially cheaper than S3 and does the job for this situation. Since you don’t have plans to offer Glacier support, I’m exploring alternatives such as splitting out long-term archival to Glacier via FastGlacier, and using DropBox or equiv for other files.

  • Paul

    I’m just a single user backing up just one PC (though I have setup other family members with you as well), so I’m not too interested in solutions aimed at businesses (servers, workgroups, etc).

    After four years, I must admit to being on the verge of leaving – the complete lack of new releases and communication was leading me to think the product had been abandoned and therefore becoming increasingly difficult for me to recommend to others. I’m happy using Amazon S3 for my regular backups, but want to start using Glacier for cheap long term storage of “snapshots”. Ideally I want one product to do both.

    As other people have already noted, this blog post is a good start, but it takes positive actions over a period of time to rebuild confidence. Seeing releases with new features added (preferably Glacier!) will certainly help.

    Good to see someone back in control of JD and hope it can get going again!

  • Thomas Brewster

    Security = top concern beyond basic reliability and functionality.
    Glacier = great low cost option for long term storage, please support it.

  • Steve

    Can I suggest adding the option to Restore via physical media? For example you charge a fee to send out a complete restore on DVD via express mail.

    This would provide a last resort option if there was a total loss of data and we couldn’t wait to download with out slow connection.

  • Mike

    Been a reseller of JD for some time now and although the development has been seriously lacking over the past two years the product actually works very well and I must say it works far better than several newer alternatives that I’ve tried.

    I have looked around for alternatives to resell to my customers but frankly there isn’t anything out there at a comparable price point that actually works well.

    The software is very dated now but it does work well so really just needs modernizing. The reseller portal however is a nightmare, that really needs some serious attention, setting up new accounts and reporting on individual sub accounts needs some work, it would also be nice to be able to separately identify each sub account when receiving monthly invoices in order to see exactly what each client is using without having to do individual reports for each one which is time consuming.

    Also would be useful to be able to place a limit on sub accounts I sell to my clients, some clients like to pay a fixed sum per month for a capped amount of storage. I do offer this when invoicing customers but it does mean that I need to keep a close eye on the reports to ensure those clients have not exceeded the limit I agree with them and if they do there’s no way for me to stop them using any extra space.

    Any way, as others have stated here, many of us have been told several times over the past two years that changes are coming, I really do hope that this is a sign of good things to come.

    By the way, although development has been non-existent over the last two years I have found technical support to be prompt and efficient every time I’ve needed to contact them which has probably been one of the main reasons I haven’t put more effort into looking for an alternative.

    Lets hope we start seeing some changes pretty soon.

  • Scott H.

    Been a JD user since late 2007. Been very happy over the years and the handful of times I’ve needed to restore data or move backup to new PC, all went well. Thumbs up!

    Sync on the other hand has been a bit unreliable. In my single user environment, sync works OK 90% of the time. I get the occasional conflict file when I shouldn’t, but that’s manageable. What’s a real pain in the rear is the fact that you only support case sensitivity. I understand Linux and Mac are case sensitive file systems, but Windows is not. If I’m in an all Windows environment, allow me to choose ignore case in filenames/folders. This way if I later change a filename to have a capital letter I won’t end up with sync errors that seems to stop the whole sync process. Bad!

    Does the current JD Desktop app support Windows 8? Does Server support Server 2011/2012?

    Keep it up and please let us know about when we can expect what I’ll call JD4 for now. You say 2013, but are we talking Q1, Q2….

    Scott

  • Scott H.

    P.S. You may want to reach out to Steve Gibson at http://www.grc.com and let him know what’s up. He went out on a limb 5 years ago and promoted JD when Dave Wright went on his show. More recently he did a show discussing the status of cloud backup and when JD came up everyone was wondering what was going on. He had no choice but to write you off and recommend others as he figured JD was an EOL product.

    And I sure hope what will be the future of JD will be a product that security minded people will embrace. Its one of the reasons JD got such a kick start back when Dave was running the company. Please don’t lose sight of that. Poor/low security cloud backup solutions are a dime a dozen.

    Scott

  • Nick

    I’d like to see Glacier so I can get all my music backed-up at a lower cost…

  • Laurent

    Plan to abandon JD at some point too.

  • ciprian

    Hi,
    I switched from JD as a backup service, to Arq and SpiderOak for sync/share. I still use JD as a offsite storage disk, for things that i don’t use frequently, i like the possibility to mount the network disk and use it as regular disk.
    The motive to switch is that Arq give the possibility to activate ReducedRedundancy and more recently the S3 Glacier. I have around 1T of things backuped from 3 mac’s, so it start to cost for standard S3. Also as i have a multibackup solution, the RRD and Glacier are perfect.
    I use CrashPlan to backup between mac’s and locally to each to second drive, Arq on each to external.
    If JD bring RRD and Glacier for backups and sync and remote-drive, i will re-pay for JD (used workstation multi user plan)
    Cheers,

  • ADW

    I’ve been a JD reseller almost since JD started, but because of the lack of information and support over the past 18 months, I was actively looking for an alternative when I saw this blog entry. It’s definitely encouraging that JD have informed the user base about their plans for the product, but as other posters have said, we’ve had the odd announcement before, followed by months of deathly silence, so will it be different this time? I’ve continued to use the product because it works well, but over the past few months I’ve had a nagging fear that RackSpace would pull the plug. This announcement has allayed that fear a little, but it hasn’t gone away, so I’ll be keeping my options open for a while to see what happens.

    I think the lack of Glacier support will be a killer for most resellers anyway! I reckon I could halve my storage costs by moving my clients archive data to Glacier, and keeping the more current stuff on normal storage. The 4 hour restore window isn’t a concern as I keep on-site backups as well.

  • Dan

    I used JD a lot in the past and recommended it to many friends and family. However, since using it in a more professional capacity (I run a small sized company with ~11 computers and 3 servers I need to backup) JD stopped any active development which has severely impacted performance and my appetite for using it. I have cancelled most of my JD subscriptions running the minimum to keep what I need running.

    I’ll keep a watch out for how this develops and may come back if it looks reliable but S3 should remain supported or I won’t be interested and moving backups that are over 1 month old onto Glacier would be a feature that would definitely make me come back. I’m evaluating alternatives and have no qualms with moving soon if things don’t improve or I find something that is similar and adequate for my needs.

  • http://www.hollandcs.co.uk Kevin Holland

    I too have been disappointed that communication from JD dried up and that the JD product roadmap published nearly two years ago appeared to have come to nothing. It hasn’t been a big problem for me as my clietns’ backups were still working and we have been able to perform restores on all our test days. However the lack of communication had caused me to start looking around for alternatives and I have a number of SOHO clients who are using Crashplan because of this. It’s ggod to hear that there is (potentially) still life in JD so I look forward to seeing what may come about.

    As an IT consultant, the security and integrity of my clients’ data is of paramount importance. The ‘Insecurity in the Jungle’ article posted has me concerned and could be a deal-breaker for me. I don’t use Jungledisk as my clients’ only backup medium as we mix online plus disk-based. Jungledisk is the ‘absolute worst case’ DR stage.

    I will watch the discussion on the above article with interest, in particular Jungledisk’s response to the reported issues.

    As a small IT consultancy business the most critical thing for me is your reseller support. My wishlist includes:

    * A bespoke portal for resellers, built from the ground up with us in mind. We should be able to manage client accounts AND backup and restore jobs from the one location.
    * Free white-labelling (including web front end, installed client and email notifications to clients).

    Glacier support would be something I’d be very interested to see appear in the product, but not until the security issues have been put to bed.

  • http://www.hollandcs.co.uk Kevin H

    I too have been disappointed that communication from JD dried up and that the JD product roadmap published nearly two years ago appeared to have come to nothing. It hasn’t been a big problem for me as my clietns’ backups were still working and we have been able to perform restores on all our test days. However the lack of communication had caused me to start looking around for alternatives and I have a number of SOHO clients who are using Crashplan because of this. It’s ggod to hear that there is (potentially) still life in JD so I look forward to seeing what may come about.

    As an IT consultant, the security and integrity of my clients’ data is of paramount importance. The ‘Insecurity in the Jungle’ article posted has me concerned and could be a deal-breaker for me. I don’t use Jungledisk as my clients’ only backup medium as we mix online plus disk-based. Jungledisk is the ‘absolute worst case’ DR stage.

    I will watch the discussion on the above article with interest, in particular Jungledisk’s response to the reported issues.

    As a small IT consultancy business the most critical thing for me is your reseller support. My wishlist includes:

    * A bespoke portal for resellers, built from the ground up with us in mind. We should be able to manage client accounts AND backup and restore jobs from the one location.
    * Free white-labelling (including web front end, installed client and email notifications to clients).

    Glacier support would be something I’d be very interested to see appear in the product, but not until the security issues have been put to bed.

  • http://vipsentry.ca Daniel Roop

    Will cloud drive continue to be supported as it is now and, will the whitelabel version also get apps for IOS and Android? Very important going forward.

  • huw_jungledisk

    @ Everyone – don’t panic! We haven’t lost or deleted your comments. We had such an overwhelming response to the blog post that it became clear we needed a better way to manage and respond to the comments. We’ve installed Disqus and are just waiting for the posts to be imported. After which I’ll work to respond to every comment. I truly appreciate your patience.

    Thanks,
    Huw

    Huw Edwards

    GM, Jungle Disk

  • huw_jungledisk

    @ Everyone – comments have now been imported. We’re going to re-post my original responses as replies to each individual’s comment. Thanks for your patience!

  • Daniel Roop

    Will “Cloud Drive” remain and will there finally be an IOS and Android App for the whitelabel version of Jungledisk for Workgroups?

    • huw_jungledisk

      When you say “Cloud Drive” I assume you are referring to Jungle Disk Workgroup edition as purchased through Rackspace Email & Apps? We are working to improve the support experience for all Jungle Disk customers and will be communicating some positive changes in the new year.
      Unfortunately we don’t plan to whitelabel the current iOS app (or a future Android app should we eventually release one).

      • Philip Denton

        Really? Still no plans for an Android app?!?!?

        • Huw Edwards

          Given the number of customer requests, releasing an Android app is something we are giving serious consideration. When we have concrete information to provide, along with any timeline, we’ll be sure to update you.

  • Scott H.

    My comments were deleted. Nice. Huw, can you go back and find them please? Listed as Scott H.

    • huw_jungledisk

      Hi Scott. I can see the comments but doesn’t look like Disqus imported them correctly. Let me take a closer look. Thanks for your patience.

  • Scott H.

    This is what I remember posting.

    1) Can you advise Steve Gibson from GRC that you aren’t dead. He went out on a limb years ago and touted JD. He’s recently been talking about how JD appears to be dead.

    2) Can you address the sync tool always supporting case sensitivity? Windows only users would prefer for case to be ignored. Under the current setup, if a Windows user starts changing lots of filenames (by only changing case) they can really cause JD sync problems. Maybe a simple tick box option for Windows only environments.

    • Huw Edwards

      1) I reached out to Steve on Twitter. Thanks for the heads up.
      2) I’ve heard this complaint/suggestion from several customers now. We’ve logged it and as we work on software fixes determine if this is something we can address. Thanks for the helpful feedback.

  • Steven

    If I had to pick one thing, just one: a through security review.

    —–

    If I could pick two: My biggest annoyance with Jungle Disk was the rare (but annoying) event when Jungle Disk’s licensing servers were down… the client wouldn’t login. A grace period at least please.

    —–
    Glacier is for warehousing not backing or syncing.
    I strongly prefer if you kept Amazon S3.
    There’s Google’s Cloud Storage but adding a new storage service isn’t really high up my list.

    I do recall Jungle Disk promising to open source libraries that could be used to access Jungle Disk volumes without the help of Jungle Disk.

    I’d like deduplication built in to JD’s File System rather than Jungle Disk Plus.

    Glad I checked this blog after JD’s iOS app updated.

    Welcome Back!

    • Huw Edwards

      As part of taking charge of the business we are undertaking a thorough security review and we will be remediating any issues or weaknesses that uncovers.

      We’ll take a closer to the licensing server issue you describe – I can see how that would be frustrating.

      I agree with your statement about about Glacier.

      We historically provided an open source tool to access Jungle Disk volumes in S3. We’ll evaluate our options for extending that.

      Glad you saw the iOS app update and checked in with us!

  • http://www.facebook.com/joey.katzen Joey Katzen

    I might be in the minority, in that our small company simply uses JungleDisk as a simple networked drive.

    That being said, we’re going to need to see some improvements to the iPad app soon, or we’ll have to look at alternatives (we’ve already begun):

    * DEALBREAKER: When in landscape mode, there HAS to be a way to hide the list of files. We give PPT and PDF presentations via iPad all the time and have been unable to do so directly off of JungleDisk because we can’t get a full screen view.

    * Also: There needs to be some way to view the full length of file names on the iPad app. We have lots of files whose filenames begin similarly. Accordingly, we’d like to be able to view a full-screen file browser.

    (Do you have any plans to improve the iPad app? Any estimates on timing?)

    Things I love now:

    * It’s so easy for us to use on the computer and share throughout the company.

    * Automatic backup of previously saved versions of files in case something gets corrupted on save, or if we accidentally delete something.

    • Huw Edwards

      Thanks for the feedback.

      We made a few updates to the iPad app before Christmas which we submitted to the Apple Stora and we are awaiting Apple to approve. This should improve the experience in landscape mode. Your suggestions on other areas to improve the app are really helpful and we’ll include your feedback as we work on additional improvements to the app. I can’t give an estimate on timing yet but this is something that we are working on.

      I’m glad the service is working well for your company and I hope additional improvements to product will make it even better for you.

      • http://www.facebook.com/joey.katzen Joey Katzen

        I’m a little confused. There’s a new version out as of Feb 1st, but it didn’t improve the landscape issues I addressed, as I thought you said it would. What did it address, and do you have updated timing yet on full screen landscape?

        • jarren

          Hello Joey,

          We have verified that new app has resolved the issue with landscape mode. If you are still having issues can you submit a ticket to support.jungledisk.com? One of our techs will be happy to work with you on resolving the issue.

        • Jarren Oliphint

          Hello Joey,

          We have verified that new app has resolved the issue with landscape mode. If you are still having issues can you submit a ticket to support.jungledisk.com? One of our techs will be happy to work with you on resolving the issue.

          • http://www.facebook.com/joey.katzen Joey Katzen

            For the record, it doesn’t address my issue. After discussing it with JD support, your reps confirmed that in no way did it address the full screen landscape issue. It took multiple emails to get JD support to even believe me or to try to understand — very frustrating.

            This is such an obvious feature (full screen in landscape, hiding the list of files) because so many people give presentations from the iPad these days. I can’t give presentations from the JD app, though, and have to email myself the file.

            Oh well. Hopefully soon.

          • Jarren Oliphint

            Hello Joey,

            I want to apologize for the confusion on our part with the issue that you are having. We recently updated the Ipad application for a different landscape issue that prevented the ability to enter login credentials when the app was in landscape. When you submitted your ticket we were trying to get as much information to determine what the issue was and if it was related to our recent update. We are aware that some customers utilize the app in many different ways and I agree with you that your issue needs to be addressed. Like stated in your support ticket we have logged this as a feature request for a future update, but we currently do not have an eta on this.

  • Richard

    Like many others here, I’m glad to see that JD is alive and well. I’m a home user and have continued to use the service despite the “quiet period”.

    My top request to Huw and the team would be to modernise the Mac client and make it much more resilient. Currently it behaves unpredictably if a Mac laptop enters sleep part-way through a backup. It should also prevent a laptop from entering sleep whilst a backup is occurring.

    I’m looking forward to seeing what is delivered in 2013, with hopefully regular updates.

    • Huw Edwards

      We have had a number of requests to modernise the Mac client and we’ve logged your feedback. As we prioritize bug fixes, application improvements etc this feedback is really helpful.

  • Tim O’Sullivan

    We too use JD as a simple networked drive in our small business, since most of our employees are remote. Mix of Mac and PCs and iOS devices. Mac client needs updating as it does not work properly (especially sharing) in the past two operating systems. Signed up for services about 2 years ago through Rackspace (as “CloudDrive”), where it’s advertised as a file server. Well, if files aren’t locked-out when someone opens it for editing…you’re not a very good file server. Are there any plans to boost the file server features? Otherwise I’ll leave and go with something like Egnyte, which is much more feature rich.

    • Huw Edwards

      File-locking is something that is requested a lot and a feature we want to add but unfortunately it’s likely to be some time, in the next iteration of the network drive product, that we’ll likely have this functionality.

      • Huw Edwards

        Also, I don’t believe Egnyte has file-locking in place yet, though they do note it’s on their roadmap.

  • http://www.facebook.com/claude.m.landry Claude M. Landry

    Glad to hear from JD. We have been using JD at the office since its
    beginning in 2008. It is quite stable on Mac and we never had syncing
    problems between users.

    However, the lack of evolution has motivated us to start looking at other solutions. The Web interface is outdated and cumbersome to use. No custom branding. No easy sharing of files with external client. No integration with Google Apps. No SSO. Limitative iOS support. No automated users provisioning and administration. Etc.

    We started looking at other solutions like dropbox for teams, oxygencloud, popgoplug, syncplicity, and many many others… I hope you make some changes before we definitely pick a replacement. Time is running.

    • Huw Edwards

      Thanks for the feedback on your requirements. We are looking to make improvements in a lot these areas and we’ll be sure to keep you posted.

  • Admin132

    Hum – another period of discomforting silence. Any updates for the start of the new year?

    • Huw Edwards

      Hold tight we’ve got a new year’s update coming! ;)

    • Huw Edwards

      We just put out a new post with our update for the start of the year

      • Admin132

        Thank you – communications are improving. Reading between the lines it would seem the existing consumer product line will remain largely unchanged for awhile. That’s good and bad. You’ll need to maintain a regular dialog with the user community to hold interest. “This year” leaves a lot of uncertainty given the number of quality alternatives in the marketplace.

        • Huw Edwards

          Yes, we’ll work on our ongoing dialogue – you’ll see more on the blog over the next few weeks. And we’ll provide clearer timelines as we nail down the details.

  • http://www.facebook.com/spurlockjosh Josh Spurlock

    FYI: there are responses on your blog as old as 19 days that raise
    legitimate questions and concerns, that to-date have no response from
    you. If you are going to make a claim about listening to your customers
    and being responsive 19 days is too long to wait to respond to
    legitimate questions and concerns. Even if you don’t have solid answers,
    you can at least acknowledge the questions in a timely manner to show
    your listening. JD needs to step up the “radical support” that is the
    trademark of it’s parent.

    • Huw Edwards

      Yes, we’ve been slow to respond to a number of the comments over the holidays. All I can offer is my apologies and we’ve responded now. For a number of these we don’t have solid answers, hence waiting to bring onboard Trey (our new “CTO” – see our latest blog post) before responding, but we’ll make a concerted effort to be prompt in response even if we don’t have a clear answer.

  • http://www.facebook.com/spurlockjosh Josh Spurlock

    For years now, as seen in the forum post, we’ve been asking for the capability to have multiple users with their own configurations on the same device. Currently workgroup only allows a single set of configurations no matter who is logged in on the device. This needs to change.

    • Huw Edwards

      Thanks Josh. We’ve logged this as a feature request and can see the thread in the forums. If we add this to the roadmap we’ll be sure to reach out to you and the other commenters on the thread.

  • Philip Denton

    +1 for all the feature requests above! A true white-label solution with centralized reporting is essential.

  • Philip Denton

    Seeding an account with a mailed HDD would be great, too! I’m pretty sure this is something Mozy offers.

    • Huw Edwards

      Steve and Philip – thanks for the suggestion. We’ve logged your interest and we’ll take it into account when we’re planning product improvements.

  • Huw Edwards

    Thanks for the feedback. We’ve logged your suggestions and will use them to inform our decision process for areas to focus development. We are taking security seriously and it’s a top priority in our current development efforts.

  • Huw Edwards

    A heads up that I responded to your similar posting below.

  • Huw Edwards

    Yes, we will continue to support “Cloud Drive” (aka Workgroup Edition) for Rackspace customers.
    We don’t currently have plans for whitelabeled versions of any mobile apps but I’ve logged your request for this feature.

  • Huw Edwards

    Thanks for your feedback. We will continue to support S3 however we do not plan to support Glacier at this time. We have noted your request for this feature.

  • Huw Edwards

    I hope it allays your fears somewhat that Rackspace is supporting and investing in Jungle Disk going forward.
    Unfortunately we don’t have plans to offer Glacier support however we’ve logged your interest in this feature.

  • Huw Edwards

    Unfortunately we don’t have plans to offer Glacier support however we’ve logged your interest in this feature.

  • Huw Edwards

    Thanks for your feedback especially regarding the sync functionality. This is an area we see a lot of customer issues. Providing detail like you have here is helpful.

    The current JD desktop app supports Windows 8 and server app supports Server 2012. This is a message we need to convey more clearly to customers.

    We’re working on the timeframes and hope to give a clearer indication then.

  • Huw Edwards

    Thanks for your detailed feedback of how you are using different product. Unfortunately we don’t have plans to offer Glacier or RRS support however we’ve logged your interest in these features.

  • Huw Edwards

    A heads up that I responded to your similar posting above.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jeremy.heffner Jeremy Heffner

    Too little, too late. I’ve moved on to Arq.

    • Huw Edwards

      We are sorry to lose you as a customer but thanks for letting us know. If you’d be willing to share what was the biggest drivers for you choosing Arq that would be helpful as we look to improve Jungle Disk?

  • Huw Edwards

    We are sorry to hear this. If you would care to share we’d love to hear your feedback.

  • Huw Edwards

    Thanks for the honest feedback. We recognize we have a lot to do but detailed comments like this are invaluable to inform our development efforts going forward.

  • Huw Edwards

    Thank you for your feedback. We are taking security seriously and it’s a top priority in any development efforts.
    Unfortunately we do not plan to support Glacier at this time.

  • Huw Edwards

    Thanks for your feedback. We recognize that positive actions speak louder than words and hope to prove that in time. We are working hard prioritizing critical bug fixes and improvements. Unfortunately we don’t plan to support Glacier at this stage. We’ll keep you posted with our progress.

  • Huw Edwards

    We will be sorry to lose you as a customer but appreciate the honest feedback.

  • Huw Edwards

    We welcome your feedback and thank you for sharing so openly. Our choices aren’t going to satisfy everyone and we recognize there are alternatives out there that meet different customer use cases.

  • Nigel J. Terry

    Huw

    Unfortunately, I think this is all too little, too late. Jungle DIsk was an amazing leading product when it first started out and I was very evangelical about it to many of the agents I work with. However when Rackspace took over everything stopped. Managers made statements about upcoming products that never happened and then vanished without comment (Android version???). Support was non-existent. I really wonder why Rackspace wasted their money.

    I cannot afford to have our business depend on an unsupported product with no future, so like many others I left Jungle Disk for another product. There is just too much competiton out there and you have gone from market leaders to market laggards. I doubt you can catch up. It will certainly take more than a semi-positive email.

    My personal advice to you would be to dust of your resume, you may need it.

    Best of luck

    Nigel

    • Huw Edwards

      Thanks for the honest feedback. We recognize the proof will be in what we can deliver and we’re working hard toward our stated goals.

  • simongarlick

    I’m a lifetime licence holder (signed up in Oct 2007) and I was a huge JD evangelist, but I haven’t used the service in quite a while, and that’s for a number of reasons. In no particular order:

    The March 2009 debacle. Unforgivable, and the apologies were shallow and insincere.

    JD missed the boat on sync. Could’ve been a better Dropbox, decided not to. Now there’s Dropbox and Sugarsync and Skydrive and Google Drive and…

    Jungledisk on OS X turned into a mess.

    Product fragmentation. Once upon a time there was “JungleDisk”. It was a mounted drive, you put stuff in it. Now there’s Workgroup, Server, Desktop, Backup, S3, Cloud Files, different client versions, whatever, I give up.

    Price. I now pay Dropbox to sync and I pay Crashplan to backup, each of those offers better equivalent functionality than JD, and my combined bill is less than half of what it would be if I had kept using JD. I’m getting a lot better for a lot cheaper elsewhere.

    Communication. JungleDisk the company stopped talking to me and most importantly IT STOPPED LETTING ME TALK WITH OTHER USERS. The old JD forums were full of advice, tips, and helpful fellow customers. Now the “forums” are FAQ answers that read like they got run past the marketing department first. The product tips forum has had 68 posts in four years. 68 posts would have been a slow HOUR back in 2008. But then March 2009 happened. Better to shut down the forums than let people post critical feedback.

    Basically what I’m saying is… sorry, too late.

    • Huw Edwards

      Thank you for providing such honest feedback. We realize we have huge challenges to overcome and the proof will be in our actions and what we deliver.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=643105322 Mark Harburn

    Sorry, forgot
    Exchange, SQL and SharePoint backups. Again scan of large file set is painful.
    I’ve just had a look at the competitors and they don’t touch JD on price to be
    honest. However clear reseller pricing is key otherwise we just loose customers
    direct to JD.

  • Aaron Roydhouse

    I wish you had contacted me after all these years. I just spent the break moving the entire family to CrashPlan and we just start a backup consolidation trial at my business with Crashplan rather than JD, which would once have been first choice. Sure, survey half but perhaps mention it to the other half; Did the half you surveyed mention poor communication per chance? :-)

    I would like to believe your post, but we here all remember the infamous ‘Road Ahead’ blog entry 2 years ago that was the tombstone to any activity. We remember 2009 when the support forums became closed and all support communication ended. I’ve been in the 4-year customer requests post for an Android client, which occasionally Jungle Scott (who is/was clearly an iPhone user) told us was ‘coming soon’.

    In short, no talk of the vague future or ‘coming soon’ please. Give us action or actual dates or I doubt anyone will be convinced!

    • Huw Edwards

      Thanks for the honest feedback and advice. We recognize actions are the only way we are going to convince customers of our intentions. We are sorry to see you leave but understand you have to make the right decision for you and your business.

  • http://www.facebook.com/brian.buresh Brian Buresh

    Hope this doesn’t mean that old customers will no longer be able to use AWS for backup.

  • http://twitter.com/noblemaster Christoph Aschwanden

    This post is about half a year old and nothing appears to have changed? There are a few things with the software that need fixing (not major but annoying) but nothing has been done. The current release 3.16 is over 2 years old. Any roadmaps? Does it take half a year to get a roadmap together? Shall we consider JungleDisk abandoned?