Jungle Disk is both the name of an
online backup software service and a privately held data security company. It was one of the first backup services to use
cloud storage
Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on "the cloud". The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is ty ...
and
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...
.
In 2009 after being acquired by
Rackspace
Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...
the service added
Rackspace Cloud Files. The name is a
word association as the
Amazon rainforest is a Jungle and Disk is a common shorthand for a
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magn ...
.
Backup service overview
Jungle Disk backup is a monthly subscription software service that supports laptops, desktops, and servers for
Microsoft Windows,
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...
, and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
operating systems. Data is backed up to an online disk using either a continuous backup (aka.
sync) or scheduled to back up of selected files, folders, or a everything on a system. Data can be accessed from the software client, a web browser, or mobile devices running
Android
Android may refer to:
Science and technology
* Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human
* Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system
** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...
or
iOS. It also provides a
WebDAV
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concu ...
server for integration with other applications. Customers can protect their data using AES-256
encryption
In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can dec ...
with their own key so even Jungle Disk employees cannot access any records. Each subscription includes 10 gigabytes of storage with pay-as-you-go for additional data.
[
]
History
Jungle Disk was founded in
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,71 ...
by Dave Wright in 2006. On October 22, 2008, Jungle Disk entered into an agreement to be acquired by Rackspace Hosting, Inc. Rackspace purchased Jungle Disk in order to expand their cloud hosting services. After the acquisition integration Dave left Rackspace to found
SolidFire and then Jungle Disk was relocated to
San Antonio
("Cradle of Freedom")
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, mapsize = 220px
, map_caption = Interactive map of San Antonio
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name = United States
, subdivision_type1= State
, subdivision_name1 = Texas
, subdivision_t ...
in 2010. The pace of development slowed down as Rackspace focused on its
Cloud infrastructure software platform which became
OpenStack
OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platfo ...
. In 2013, Rackspace revived Jungle Disk customer support going from ticket only service to include phone, chat and ticketing. On January 5, 2016, Jungle Disk spun out of Rackspace US, Inc. and is now a privately held company headquartered in San Antonio, TX.
On December 5, 2017, Jungle Disk announced it acquired SafetyNet, the first backup for QuickBooks Online, from Jobber.
In May 2022, it acquired online backup company
ElephantDrive.
Criticism
The Jungle Disk client software did not receive an update from 2012-2014 and then while part of the Cloud Office portfolio a new version was released in December 2015.
On June 3, 2011,
Colin Percival
Colin A. Percival (born 1980) is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford. While at university he joined the F ...
, owner of
Tarsnap (a competitor of Jungle Disk), identified two potential weaknesses in Jungle Disk's security:
* The lack of a
Message Authentication Code
In cryptography, a message authentication code (MAC), sometimes known as a ''tag'', is a short piece of information used for authenticating a message. In other words, to confirm that the message came from the stated sender (its authenticity) and ...
means that file corruption (accidental or deliberate) or arbitrary file content insertions
["If the people running the underlying storage service (Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files) know the contents of a file stored via Jungle Disk, they could transform it into anything they want — planting files which are dangerous (e.g., viruses) or even illegal (e.g., child pornography). " Percival 2011] will not be detected if the attacker can bypass Amazon or Rackspace security and directly modify data in S3 or Cloud Files.
* The use of
MD5 as a
Key derivation function
In cryptography, a key derivation function (KDF) is a cryptographic algorithm that derives one or more secret keys from a secret value such as a master key, a password, or a passphrase using a pseudorandom function (which typically uses a cryp ...
makes it
computationally feasible to perform a brute-force attack on a Jungle Disk password.
See also
*
List of online backup services
*
Comparison of online backup services
This is a comparison of online backup services.
Online backup is a special kind of online storage service; however, various products that are designed for file storage may not have features or characteristics that others designed for backup have ...
References
External links
* {{Official website, http://jungledisk.com/
Jungle Disk BlogReview in PC Magazine
Backup software
File hosting
Cloud storage
S3