Recent blog entries:

• S3 Backup Release Candidate
• We won’t be getting into web services backup, but you can
• Review of New S3 Feature: Versioning
• S3 Backup beta 18: New file-db
• S3 Backup beta 17
• S3 Backup beta 16
• S3 Backup beta 15 rev.1287
• S3 Backup beta 15 rev.1255
• S3 Backup beta 15 rev.1221
• S3 Backup beta 15 rev.1204

The saying goes “when all is said and done, more is said than done”, and if there are exceptions to it, then this is one. There were no new releases of our software for a long time and I’ve had a rough time this winter and spring which set me back on a number of fronts, however I never gave up on S3 Backup or any other projects of ours and things kept moving.

I’m really in favor of actions doing the talking which is something I obviously take to extremes sometimes — there were no status updates here for months. That’s something I want to change now, so whichever way the development goes I will be keeping you guys up to date. And the good news there’s a lot to report: the rough times are over and as I come back to work on the code all-out, I can’t help but see that the work put into it so far is of great quality and the decisions I made along the way are generally correct.

The reason why there were no intermediate releases is that last year I had to make a decision: to get on track to where I want to take S3 Backup and my company in general we had to step back and replace some ad-hoc parts with carefully engineered components. That means that the old and the new parts need to interoperate — that interop takes effort so it’s a choice between a) getting the fully updated app out faster or b) having steady release schedule but with slower overall development. I went for the first route which would have worked well if not for the unexpected things life can throw at us. Engineering-wise there were no issues, it’s just something completely unrelated that messed up the plans. I reported back in Autumn that I thought the solution would be to go back to plan B, which was something I didn’t think through at the time — it didn’t take much time to see that initial development plan was good — it’s the things outside its scope that were the problem.

So here we are — finishing the new versions of our apps and then some. Hopefully we will gradually be revealing new features and products that will make it more clear what kind of work we were doing and I expect you will appreciate the reasoning behind the re-engineering.

Also I want to thank everyone who has shown support and interest in our work during the past year — I’m really sorry I quite often was unable to reply in timely manner, but please know that I truly appreciate it and work to justify your trust.

We are here and looking forward to an eventful year ahead of us.