08/24/2010Licensing System Update

Last week we’ve released a new version of the customer portal and it is working without a hitch. If you go there, you should see a list of your purchased and trial licenses and if you view the installed software details, you can change the licenses assigned to your computers. When you change a license like that, that’s all you need to do. S3 Backup running on the computer itself will eventually want to refresh its license and will ask the webservice for an update and will get this new license you’ve just assigned to it. But if you want to, you can refresh the license manually and see the effect immediately.

MachineID Issue

During this period we’ve also discovered a weakness in how a machine ID is being determined. We were relying on an ID generated by Windows at install-time, but it turned out that it is not really GUID and we’ve already encountered some ID overlapping. What this means is that some completely different computers think their machine IDs are the same. The effect of that is that when one of those machines’ owners binds her installation to an account, the other one would not be able to do that and will get “access denied” error when trying to manage his instance.

This is something we’ve already managed to resolve, but we delay the release of the fix to a post-1.0 release, so that 1.0 is not delayed any further and the Gold release is identical to the Release Candidate.

Preorder Deal

I want to remind you that with each order you get licenses to use the app on five personal computers (but not servers). Those licenses are reusable, so that if you stop using one of your computers due to an upgrade, or if it breaks or for any other reason, you can revoke a license issued to it and reuse it for a different computer. We are also working on a Mac OS X version and if you have any Macs these licenses will be usable there as well. At the discounted preorder pricing this is tremendous value, so consider purchasing now. We will be completely restructuring our offer after a 1.0 release, so this is one of the last days this deal is available.