yesterdayS3 Backup RC3

S3 Backup 1.0 Release Candidate 3 is now out! This is the last release before we go gold and release 1.0 final. What remains to be done is to put some finishing touches to our payment processor integration and we’re all set. This shouldn’t take longer than a couple of days and as the name suggests the 1.0 final will be identical to the current release unless we discover some problem.

Licensing system overview

The RC series was a great success with practically no bugs discovered during this period, confirming that the app is fully deserving of 1.0 moniker even for such a critical task as data backup. It did take quite a bit more time than anticipated to get here, though. This was caused by making sure that all the details of our licensing system are fully ironed out. And it’s a beatiful piece of software which we have full confidence will serve us and our customers well. I’ll be writing more on it in a couple days.

Essentially it’s a system that lets one try, buy and further manage software without bothering with keycodes, saving order receipts etc. Having this central location where the customer’s software is listed opens up the possibility to further improve it with backup status overview for all your computers and other time-saving features.

This system is being rolled out gradually. At this moment it is limited to binding your S3 Backup installations to your account (we use Google Accounts for login, so most of you will not even need to register). In a couple days we’ll roll out the next stage, at which point for all of you who have preordered S3 Backup your orders will be automatically imported and appear in your account. We determine the account to bind the orders to based on the emails used in the order. We allow you to add as many email addresses per account as you need, so if you’ve made an order using an email different to the one you use for login, it still can be automatically imported.

This system allows us to finally get rid of timed expiry. The trial licenses still have a time limit, but if you have preordered or will decide to buy a license later, you will not be required to reinstall the app.

Licensing system UI

The licensing system was the primary focus of development for the last couple months, but instead of explaining all about it right now, we’ll do that in a separate blog post. Here I’ll just list the licensing-related things that were added to the UI.

  • The status bar now shows your license status. You can click it to bring up a window that lists more details about your license and allows you to refresh it or manage it online.
  • If your current license requires your attention (such as your trial has expired), this window will be shown automatically on startup.
  • Overall license subsystem is very smart and should not be intrusive at all. Please let us know if you have any concerns.
  • We’ll publish an extensive FAQ on our licensing system properties from users’ and from technical perspectives, but for now we’ll be happy to answer your questions in the comments section.

New features

This is a release in RC series, so we intended to hold all the new features back for a post-1.0 release, however, as it took so long, we decided to include some of them now.

  • New Singapore region is now supported.
  • We’ve added support for Reduced Redundancy Storage. RSS is not really suitable for backups, as there’s a chance of data loss, but it’s up to you to use it if you want the discount (it’s 33% cheaper).
  • When cancelling the backup job, uploading will be interrupted immediately (in earlier versions current file was allowed to finish uploading).
  • App startup is much snappier, you can start changing settings and backup jobs while the app is still getting the initial file listing.
  • Deleting buckets is now faster, especially the bigger ones. We now list and delete bucket items concurrently saving memory and time.
  • When planning a backup, debug log now contains a bit more specific reason a certain file is to be uploaded.
  • We’ve updated backup progress window:
    • It now has an icon.
    • It can be resized, so there’s enough space to show even the longest filenames.
    • This window was sometimes opening behind the main window, but not anymore.

Backend changes

  • We’ve updated filesystem code to benefit from fewer, more efficient WinAPI calls.
  • Reaction was sped up quite a bit as well.
  • There’s an all-new thread management and synchronization code.
  • We took the time to add tons and tons of automated testing for our code. This means adding new features and rewrites has a lower chance of breaking anything and will take less time from now on.
  • Some third-party libraries were dropped in favour our own shiny new ones.

Some of the minor tweaks and bugfixes

  • When setting up the backup job, we don’t complain about missing drives anymore (still logged though)
  • Migration from the old filedb was failing in one very rare corner case (possibly encountered by just one customer)

Last chance to preorder

The 1.0 final release is coming up, but for now you can still preorder the personal license pack at a discount. Note that you get licenses to run S3 Backup on up to five machines! That should cover all of your desktops and notebooks.

Download S3 Backup 1.0 RC3

9 weeks agoS3 Backup RC2 update

We just released an updated S3 Backup RC2 rev.1897.

  • This release includes a fix for the premature beta expiry that happened just now.
  • It also includes some updates like support for the new Singapore region for S3.
  • The newly introduced Reduced Redundancy Storage is supported as well in the settings.

Update: Sorry about the delays, another expiry extension release was made, please hang on for a RC3 soon.

18 weeks agoS3 Backup RC2

S3 Backup 1.0 second release candidate is now available.

Along with S3 Backup 1.0 we are deploying a new licensing system to manage the licenses for our software, here’s why.

Here at maluke.com we strive to deliver the best solutions possible which sometimes takes more time than something simplistic would take, but I believe this pays off with customer satisfaction and makes our work much more efficient long-term. One of the crucial systems with any commercial software is the licensing component.

The most simple approach is to generate some activations keys that users can enter in the app to unlock full functionality. As a customer I never liked this — this requires me to worry about losing the keys I might need to reinstall the app later, I can’t be sure the next version of the software will accept my key etc. Overall the keycode approach makes me feel on my own right after the moment I purchased the software.

For that reason I wanted to give S3 Backup a better licensing system which we are now gradually rolling out. Once it’s complete it will be completely intuitive to use, but at this stage I want to give an overview of what to expect.

The idea is to eliminate as much of manual operations as possible. To accomplish this, we have a customer portal (currently in private testing) where each customer can see all his orders and any new order will be automatically linked to it. Installations of the app are also linked to customer accounts which means the app can determine if it was purchased or not without nagging the user.

Here’s how it works. When installed, S3 Backup generates a unique ID to identify that specific installation and can use it to query a webservice for a license to use. At the server side, we track known installation ids and if this specific id was linked with an order, the app will receive a response telling it that it is fully licensed. If not, the app will report that it needs to be linked to an account and will open a browser window where the user can do that in a couple of clicks. Note that you don’t need to create a new account with us, you can log in with your Google account. Neither you need to worry about keycodes and such. You just make an order and link it with your installations.

This is neat, but there’s more to it. Now, that the installation is linked to a portal, it can report its backup successes and failures. That in turn allows the user to see all of his machines status at a glance. We can also send notifications if some of the machines didn’t back up for suspiciously long time, which might indicate a problem. Of course all of this is optional, but we believe most customers will find this centralized management a great service.

Instead of just dropping the entire system at once we’ll deploy it step by step. RC2 includes most of the client-side functionality — it can query the webservice for a license and efficiently caches it locally. It also allows you to view its status in the setting dialog and even force-refresh it. The server-side just emits fully functional “beta” licenses. That is, currently every installation will get “beta” key allowing the app to be fully functional.

Next stage will be to open the customer portal for everyone. At this point you will be able to link your order to your account and we’ll release a RC3 that will assist with this operation. If no issues are discovered with RC3, it will become the 1.0 release.

If you have any questions about this system, we’ll be happy to answer them in comments to this entry.

Download S3 Backup 1.0 RC2 and consider preordeing.

This release also includes all the fixes applied during RC1 lifetime:

  • Accept Unicode in every field of feedback dialog
  • Fixed reading of config files with empty sections (as generated by certain old versions)
  • Fix settings dialog error
  • Restore custom excepthooks
  • Fix URI parsing for paths like /C: (bug introduced in RC1)

21 weeks agoS3 Backup Release Candidate

S3 Backup 1.0 first release candidate is now available.

License management component is still to be added before 1.0 final release, but feature-wise it will be identical to this RC. The purpose of the release candidate is to make sure that the final release doesn’t contain any known bugs, and to do that, it has to be under feature-freeze for some time. That is the reason we are releasing it before the licensing is enabled.

So please try it out and let us know if you encounter any problems. If no major issues are discovered we will have RC2 release later this week (which would include the license check), and the 1.0 final release the next week.

Please also consider preordering the app before the final release. Starting with 1.0 new users will get a full-featured but time-limited license and everyone who preordered will get a full license automatically. We’ll have a separate blog entry detailing how our licensing system works before the release, but if you want to learn about it right now, you can contact customer support or ask in the comments section below.

Changes in this release:

  • Enable F5 (refresh), Backspace (go to parent folder) and Delete keyboard shortcuts
  • Add “validate filedb” menu item (to be explained in a blog post on filedb)
  • Further improve filedb autorepair with an additional but efficient check if the file needs to be uploaded even if filedb says it does. This is useful for various corruption scenarios and for fresh installs backing up into existing remote folders.
  • Integrate instant feedback with new customer support system
  • Update debug log window: limit log size, make maximizable, remove “save log” button (not needed due to persistent logging)
  • Deprecate a big chunk of old GUI library
  • Migrate from Subversion to Mercurial VCS
  • Review and improve folder caching logic
  • New settings handling library (soon to come: password-protected settings compatible with automated backup, this one is requested a lot).
  • New password checking / caching code
  • Improve exe assemblage, leading to about 20% reduction in consumed memory
  • Fix an issue caused by backup rules created in very early betas containing denormalized paths
  • Fix an issue with backup not running on schedule for some customers
  • Fix an issue with filedb maintenance (removing folder but not subfolders)
  • Fix bucket manager bucket size reporting
  • Add more automated testing

Some of the features were implemented but held back for a later release:

  • Concurrent plan execution — much faster backups for jobs containing mostly small files.
  • Concurrent planning and execution — start uploading in parallel with backup planning. This will bring faster backups in general and better handling of huge backup jobs (ones that are estimated to take days or even weeks).

Download S3 Backup 1.0 RC1 and consider preordeing.

23 weeks agoWe won’t be getting into web services backup, but you can

First of all, let me say that I’m not looking for investors in my company, so what follows is not a solicitation of funding, take it at face value.

I’ve just read the news that Backupify got 900K in funding. Backupify is an online service that backups data from online accounts, mostly for various social services: Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, but also Gmail, Google Docs and a couple more. I’m happy for them, as Rob May is one of the few people around who have a healthy amount of skepticism, understand survivor bias etc. So I really wish his ventures to succeed — I’d like to see thoughtful approach rewarded, as I consider myself approaching things thoughtfully as well.

What this investment tells me is that their field is perceived as ripe for the picking. The problem is that S3 Backup 1.0 is at the door and soon I’ll have my hands full promoting and further developing the app, then there’s a server edition, a Mac port and a lineup of related products waiting for their turn. So I can’t just add online service / social backup to the pile of “things I gotta do”. On the other hand, compared to the complexity of desktop software, all the cross-platform issues, GUI programming, filesystems quirks, don’t get me started... compared to all that online accounts backup is a very straightforward task. I’m not saying it’s easy, but all the complex things about it, I’ve already figured out in my previous and current projects.

Also, it’s no secret that there’s more to business than technology, so even if I can do the tech part with my eyes closed, the business of it, that I don’t have the time or resources to get into. So here’s an idea: this is not in direct competition with that we do around here, so I don’t mind helping someone getting into that field. We would handle the initial development, you would make a business out of it. And it would cost you way less than 900K, too.

Short version: if you want to get into online services backup business fast and with a competitive, scalable solution, drop us a line.

- Sergey

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