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

S3 Backup beta 15 rev.1221

• Fixed Unicode handling in backup job filesystem tree. Our filesystem abstraction code is designed to be 100% Unicode, but there was one specific place where the app was interacting with Windows API for disk drives enumeration which is non-Unicode and that caused a glitch. Now fixed.
• Fixed missing import in advanced backup rule configuration.
• Better handles task scheduling on Vista with UAC enabled. This change however was reported to cause a different problem with task scheduling on Windows 7. We were able to reproduce it and it’s on top of our list of things to fix for the next revision.
• There were further changes to the code that used to be based on Trellis and which caused problems when ported to Reaction. This entire part of codebase is marked for replacement with a new component, but unfortunately caused errors for some users while it’s still there. What happens is that during a backup job it would pop up a debug report and print a traceback saying “Rollback not implemented”. If you still see this error, please let us know.
• Fixed a bug causing non-informative messages on some errors reported by Amazon S3 (“NameError: Message”). Now in these cases the message from S3 itself will be shown instead.
• There was more work on building the distributions and while there’s yet more to be done there are some noticeable differences:
  • One is that the app only needs a couple files in its directory once installed (to see the difference, you’ll need to uninstall the previous version first). This is great because it makes much tidier portable installations. There’s more planned on this front, but it depends on some other changes that haven’t been applied yet.
  • Another change, while small, is that the installer shrunk from about 7Mb it was before to 6.3Mb. It could have been brought down to about 5Mb if not for some Microsoft DLLs we have to bundle because they are not present on all systems. This is low priority, but I suppose sometime after the 1.0 release we’ll be able to make the installer download those only if they are needed and make the installer even smaller.

If you notice any problems, please let us know and we’ll get back to you with a fix ASAP.

And if you like S3 Backup, please consider supporting its development and order a license at discount during the beta.