I’d just like to take this time to wish everyone a fantastic couple of weeks and the best of luck into 2009. Apologies for the lack of blog updates recently, I promise we have been working! We have lots of new features and some drastic changes in store for the new year and look forward to another year of keeping all your files safe.

With kind regards,

The File Den Team

On the night of May 20th, a large storm passed over our key datacenter location in Atlanta and the datacenter’s main power supply was struck by lightning very close to the building. At this point the datacenter’s main circuit breakers were triggered and power henceforth lost to File Den’s 20+ servers resulting in the downtime on the night of 20th May into the early morning of 21st May. Such an event is a very rare phenomenon and is highly challenging to completely protect against - the power had to be shutoff to prevent any damage to servers which would have resulted in significant data and hardware damage.

File Den’s system administration team worked through the night in order to get all 20+ servers back online and even with the sudden loss of power, thanks to the advanced systems we have in place, not a single users’ files were lost. During the day of 21st May the RAID systems present on all our file storage servers had to resync many files due to the corruption of hard disks caused by the strike, and this corruption is what resulted in some of your files’ downtime during the day once the main File Den website was back online. Everything was back to normal by the afternoon of 21st May.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused during the 12 hours - natural phenomenon such as lightning strikes cannot be prevented and were a great test of our disaster recovery procedures, of which proved to be highly successful. For those interested, an official RFO concerning the event from the datacenter we are housed in can be found here.

Have a great weekend,
William Steward,
Chief Executive,
File Den

Hi everyone,

You might have noticed a rather large change to the file browser a couple of hours ago. The new file manager allows you to much more easily work with your files. To access most file management options simply right click (or if you’re using a Mac without a right mouse button, press CTRL + click) on a file and you should see the various options available to you. (i.e. Rename, Delete, Properties, etc..)

If you want to work with more than one file at once it works much like how you move around multiple files in windows explorer. (Click away from a file, and drag out an area that encases all the files you wish to work with). You can then use the standard right click functions on all the files selected at once.

The new file manager also allows you to more readily add files to albums and folders, simply select the files you wish to move and drag them to the left, into the album/folder you wish to add the files to.

There’ll be a full documentation coming up later today of which I’ll attach to this blog post.

The other major addition is the new user profiles, everyone by default has a user profile, in order to see the options available to you simply click ‘Profiles’ in the navigation bar at the top and have a look around. If you know your friends File Den usernames, you can view their profiles by simply navigating to: www.fileden.com/USERNAME.

Enjoy the new features, if you have any suggestions or feedback, post them up on the forums.

Have a great week,
The File Den Team.

Hello everyone,

It’s been busy behind the scenes for the last few months, hence the lack of blog posts recently. There’s some fairly major changes and new features of which will be announced over the coming weeks. European premium users may also notice that speeds have improved significantly over the last couple of months after sorting out our issues with our transatlantic bandwidth providers.

We also passed a fairly major milestone a few days ago, the 1.5 millionth registered account. So thanks everyone for continuing to use and promoting our service.

If you have any suggestions or feedback for us, please post them on our forums here. Enjoy the rest of your week.

The File Den Team.

Hello everyone,

Just thought I’d pass by to tell you all about the photo album upgrades. It’s now much easier to make a photo album, you can more readily add files and users can now rate the pictures of which you’ve uploaded.

Hope you enjoy the new usability.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend,

The File Den Team.

Hello everyone,

Another announcement for today includes secure logins. You might have noticed on the index page underneath the normal login a ’secure login’ button. This allows you to login securely to the File Den site by a 256bit SSL encryption link.

This means that when you’re uploading files that between you and the server the files are encrypted and hence no one that shouldn’t be able to can get their hands on your files!

Kind regards,
The File Den Team

Hello everyone,

Our premium users can now enjoy a much faster access to our service. By moving some things around and adding some new hardware we’ve upgraded all premium accounts - our premium users should now enjoy download speeds limited by their connections to the server rather than the limitations at our end.

Premium users will now not only be able to upload and download their files much faster but also access the site faster. Once logged in all premium users should notice a dramatic increase in speed, up to 20x* faster of that seen before!
Enjoy!

Kind regards,
The File Den Team.

*reliant upon the downloader/uploader’s internet connection

Thanks to the integration of Zoho document editing within File Den, you can now edit your documents and spreadsheets without leaving your File Den account.

Simply select the file within your account you wish to edit the contents of, then at the drop down menu at the top select ‘edit’. By clicking edit a page should open with a text editor for you to edit the document/spreadsheet. When you’re done, click ’save’ and it’ll automatically save into your File Den account replacing the old version.

Pretty nifty eh?

Enjoy.

The File Den Team.

Hello everyone,

Our free users can now enjoy an extra 500MB of storage space, bringing the total up to 1GB per user. All current users have been updated and all new users will automatically be allocated with 1GB of space.

Enjoy!

The File Den Team.

Hello everyone,

New File Den information

Well, there’s lots going on here at the moment to say the least - with ideas coming out of our ears, new features to integrate and work in keeping the current system running.

We’ve got some great news of which all our premium users will benefit heavily from - we’re making some changes on how premium users’ files are changed. In the near future this will mean that our premium users will all experience vast increases in download/upload speeds.

There were initially a few bugs with the album system for all users which have since the release last week been fixed - we hope that you all enjoy the feature, we have various other features planned for photo sharing so watch this space.

The future

We’re going to be taking a move to incorporate more features you’d expect from a secure online storage company - such as more control over your files and who can access them (password protection, etc) and the ability to better manage various types of media within your account.

We will of course be keeping all the features we currently have - our new direction will improve the service for all users.