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07/26/2011New Product: CDN Genie
Hello everyone!
We are now developing a new product. We decided to try something new and make its development mostly customer-driven, so we want you to get involved as soon as possible.
The new app is called CDN Genie and its sole purpose is to help manage your public content on S3, CloudFront and soon other cloud hosters and CDNs. The app will replace S3 Webmaster which is now deprecated.
If you decide to be among early adopters you will get a unique opportunity to provide input at an early stage of development. If you do, you will also get a free license when the app is released. Contact us to join the private testing group.
We intend to keep the private testing stage nice and short and move on to public releases in a couple weeks.
We are looking forward to your feedback, and remember, just email us for early access to the app.
03/10/2011S3 Backup 1.1 Final
Not a single bug or problem was found in the release candidate and S3 Backup 1.1 is now final. You can read the release notes in the S3 Backup 1.1 RC announcement or go straight to the downloads.
Update: a bug was found with new backup jobs not saving. A fixed release (r3448) is now available for download, if you’re running r3379-r3446, make sure to upgrade.
03/04/2011S3 Backup 1.1 Release Candidate
A new version of S3 Backup is available. There are no known bugs and unless some are discovered by the users we’ll mark it as stable in about a week.
There are a lot of changes in this release, but even more are coming soon. We decided to keep some of the new code disabled for now just to be on the safe side. If things go as planned and the 1.1 stable is out in a week, we’ll follow it up with further updates that we already have prepared.
Filedb updates
S3 Backup determines which files to upload by maintaining a local database of what files were already uploaded. With every file operation this database needs to be updated to be in-sync with the online copy. The database is stored in SQLite and given that every update is a transaction, it causes a couple of disk operations for every uploaded file. If you have a noisy HDD you would hear that as a “click” or, if you upload a lot of small files as a slight “HDD thrashing”.
We’ve changed this part of code to add another layer of in-memory caching, so now the updates are only written out to disk once in five seconds as a single transaction which makes it completely unnoticeable.
This also provides a performance improvement and paves the way for the updates we will reveal in future releases.
New GUI code
In preparation for the Mac and Linux ports we’ve given our GUI code an overhaul. The settings dialog is completely new and even friendlier than before. You can now create new buckets directly from the bucket selection box. Some options were removed as well, so the proxy is now acquired from the system-wide configuration and S3 connections are always SSL-encrypted.
Bucket Manager was also rewritten and among other things allows concurrent operations (listing or deleting any number of buckets at the same time). It is accessible from the menu Tools → Bucket Manager.
Faster backups
In addition to the filedb speedup we’ve determined that logging was sometimes consuming disproportionate amount of resources because of being hooked in with the GUI code. We’ve throttled the GUI updates and made sure there’s no overhead at all when the debug log is not open.
Bugfixes
- There were issues with automatic migration of backups jobs from backups.xml to the new config.json format if the config was password-protected. This was fixed.
- We’ve discovered that PyCrypto 2.0.1 which we used for the most of the app’s lifetime during beta has a bug. When the key length was longer than 192 bits, the cipher was encrypting the stream in such a way that it cannot be decoded with any other Blowfish implementation, including the one from PyCrypto 2.3 that we are using now. We now include the old buggy version of Blowfish cipher and use it when decoding the old streams. (Most users will never encounter this condition anyway).
Other changes
- Support for new Japan AWS region
- New menu item: Tools → View past logs
- Upgraded to Python 2.7
- Massive updates to the build process (this is particularly important for Mac OS X and Linux ports).
- The logging and traceback collection system was updated to be more resilient to various unicode-related issues.
- Other miscellaneous updates
Download S3 Backup 1.1 RC and let us know if you like the updates.
11/13/2010S3 Backup 1.0.5 — Much faster planning
S3 Backup 1.0.5 provides a major speedup for the backup planning process. Before this update, the more files were scheduled for upload the slower the planning process became. The upload itself was sped up as well, but to a lesser degree.
This is a recommended update for everyone who backs up at least couple hundred files. If you have a thousand or more in the backup set, the speedup will be dramatic, so make sure to upgrade.
We have more performance improvements in the pipeline. Stay tuned.
This release also fixes a bug that could cause an error when downloading a lot of files encrypted with different passwords. We found this bug during code review and as far as we know no user has encountered this problem yet.
11/09/2010S3 Backup 1.0.4 — New option for deletes propagation
In this release we add a new option to backup jobs — to delete the remote files or not. When the backup runs, it tries to make the remote copy exactly the same as the local one. There’s a problem though: sometimes you might delete a file by mistake but only take notice a while later. If the backup has run in the meantime it would delete the remote copy as well. There are some heuristics at work to prevent that, but starting with this release there’s an option to disable this delete propagation altogether.
All new backup jobs will now have the propagation of deletes disabled by default, but backups imported from the earlier versions will have it enabled to make sure this update does not change behaviour of existing backups. Of course you can always change this option by going to the settings window. The option is located on the advanced configuration tab:
Other updates
- From this version on we store the backups configuration in the
config.jsonfile along with the rest of configuration. Backups frombackups.xmlare imported automatically. - SQLAlchemy upgraded to version 0.6.5. PyCrypto upgraded to version 2.3.
- The build process was changed a bit and produces slightly smaller distributions.