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45 weeks agoS3 Backup Beta 12

Finally a new release of S3 Backup. More than 50% of all code was rewritten which makes for a lot of improvements but also some minor features were not ported to the new codebase yet. Here's the summary of changes:

• Releases get a revision number so it's easier to know how recent is your version and allows to release more frequently to reflect the small changes and bug fixes that are too minor for new release number.
• S3 backend was rewritten entirely in preparation to support unlimited file sizes, byte-level differential backups, versions and snapshots, file renames and support for centralized authentication, sub-accounts and multi-threaded task execution. Throttling is not supported in this release though.
• Storage format was updated (better compression and more extensibility) and will be documented for anyone to develop a compatible tools.
• Explorer-like backup configuration of backup jobs from Beta 11 was improved a bit as well. User feedback shows that some of the more advanced features it presents are not particularly intuitive (hint: try clicking rule summaries on the right), so it will get separate simple and advanced configuration modes in the future.
• New Bucket Manager tool allows you to create, inspect and delete old unused buckets -- this was one of the most requested features.
• Settings dialog has changed as well, which should make it more straightforward and extensible. The account setup wizard was removed in this release, because it will need to be updated to reflect the latest changes in available features.
• Application, backup job settings and hash db are all stored in XML files now which is a minor detail but allows for easier extension in the future
• Content-MD5 header is sent when uploading.
• Please note that this release has one more change: if there are any files that could not be open for backup the job will halt at that point. This is an artifact of error logging features in development and will act more intuitively by reporting such errors and proceeding in the next beta.

Current roadmap:

• Logging framework to report and log actions performed
• New storage and backup features:
  • Unlimited file size
  • Filename encryption
  • Versions and snapshots
  • File creation and modification timestamps
  • Permissions and NTFS streams backup
  • Mac-specific extensions
  • Open-file backup
  • Byte-level differential backup
  • Database backup and restore

Revisions:

• September 10: rev.879 - initial release
• September 11:
  • rev.908 - bugfix in delete operation code
  • rev.909 - a number of bugfixes (bucket deletion, streams without compression or encryption, menu refresh after first import of old backup jobs, unicode in backup jobs)
  • rev.911 - added msvcp71.dll to the distribution (required on some systems)
  • rev.915 - fixes to portable mode
• September 13: rev.920 - bugfix in parameter parsing (scheduled backup)
• September 18: rev.926 - miscellaneous improvements and an important fix to the upgrade process. For beta 12 the executable name of the app was renamed from s3backup.exe to s3-backup.exe which had an unintended effect of making old job schedules dysfunctional. This revision automatically scans for and fixes schedules that still point to old name. This is a minor change but it's important if you upgraded from beta 11 or older.
• September 25: rev.999 - no more "time too skewed" error for long-running operations.
• October 2: rev.1010 - code ported to Python 2.5 and updated all the libraries to latest stable versions. Gets rid of "path too long" error message.
• October 4: rev.1013:
  • Asyncronous initialization (more responsive on startup)
  • Better "time left" estimation
  • New commandline parameter --console shows debug console on stratup
• October 10: rev.1021:
  • Asyncronous initialization was getting in the way of scheduled backups sometimes -- fixed
  • Beginnings of new reporting code, just the statusbar for now
• December 4: rev.1142 - Bugfixes
• December 6: rev.1164 - Bugfixes
• December 14: rev.1219 - Bugfixes
• January 6: rev.1306:
  • Bugfixes to scheduling
  • Better handling of permission denied errors
  • New progress dialog
  • Internal refactoring

Beta 12 is no longer the most recent version. See product page for up-to-date version.

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