S3 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)