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.