April 26th, 2013New Features:
· SpiderOak Hive: We adopted a simple approach to syncing data across all devices by creating the SpiderOak Hive folder. Simply drag and drop files or folders into this folder and they will automatically sync to your other devices.
· OS Integration for Windows (Mac and Linux soon to follow): Granting right-click access functions via Explorer now allows you to backup, share, and view historical versions.
Enhancements:
· ShareRoom Enhancement: Users can now add passwords to their ShareRooms which adds an additional layer of security when sharing important files.
· Remote Diagnostics: We added a capability for remote diagnostics to help when troubleshooting problems with customer support. This option is disabled by default. You must explicitly enabled it. Diagnostic reports consist of metadata such as program and OS version information, file system types, program log files, folder and file names. Reports do not include backup data, passwords, or encryption information.
· Password Enhancement: As a new user, you must now change your password upon setting up your first device when JavaScript was disabled during signup and a temporary password was automatically generated.
· ShareRoom Enhancement: We added clarification to the ShareRoom creation wizard
Fixes:
· LAN sync: Fixed a bug with LAN sync, allowing the client to recover from certain error conditions
· UI / View Tab: Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the UI to erroneously disable the View tab in the client after displaying the "out of space" popup window.
· AppIndicator framework: Switch system tray icon to use AppIndicator framework on Ubuntu.
· Backup: Fixed a bug which prevents category size indicator on basic backup tab from updating without restarting the client
· Downloads: Fixed a bug that prevented downloads from resuming after a network failure.
· Uninstalling SpiderOak: Fixed a bug on Windows which reports publisher info as 'unknown' when uninstalling SpiderOak
· Sync: Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented sync from detecting a moved folder properly, instead considering it a deletion
· Backup: Fixed a bug causing backup to fail under a very rare edge case
January 17th, 2013· Fix a bug causing upgrade from one version of 4.8.x series to a newer one to fail on Windows.
December 7th, 2012· Fix a bug preventing the client from opening the web browser on some Linux setups
· Fix further bugs causing warnings when installing through Ubuntu Software Center
November 29th, 2012· Fix an issue where non-administrator user accounts could not run the program on Mac
November 29th, 2012· Fixed bug causing synchronizations to not work correctly under Windows XP in certain situations
· Re-built the Windows installation file as MSI for greater flexibility and installation user management
· Fixed bug causing recycle bin downloads to fail
· Fixed bug causing custom download locations for file-restores not to work correctly
· Fixed bug causing un-installation to require reboot under Windows
November 7th, 2012· Fixed bug causing synchronizations to not work correctly under Windows XP in certain situations
· Re-built the Windows installation file as MSI for greater flexibility and installation user management
· Fixed bug causing recycle bin downloads to fail
· Fixed bug causing custom download locations for file-restores not to work correctly
· Fixed bug causing un-installation to require reboot under Windows
July 12th, 2012· Fix minor bugs affecting the preview generator
· Fix a bug causing the program to crash when attempting to create a sync with an entire drive in Windows
· Fix bug causing single files selected for backup (ie. not part of a folder which is selected for backup) to not be monitored for immediate changes
· Fix sync bug causing subfolder contents not to be synced in some circumstances
June 19th, 2012· Fix bug causing download manager to display incorrect download size in some circumstances
· Fix rare startup bug on non-english platforms
· Improve sync feedback handling
June 13th, 2012· Do not include ShareRoom password support from previous beta
· Add digital signature to Mac builds
May 30th, 2012· Fix bug causing single-file share linking to fail for some files already contained in a ShareRoom
· Add support for optional password on ShareRooms
· Fix bug causing space calculation to be incorrect for categories with overlapping content
May 30th, 2012· Sync and LAN Sync reliability improvements
May 9th, 2012· Fixed bug causing scans to repeat constantly during scheduled time
· Fix a bug causing SpiderOak to upload duplicate directories due to Windows path separator
· Fix bug causing --generate-previews command line option to encrypted previews to the incorrect key in some circumstances
· Fix a bug causing sync to fail to update some often-changing files
· Fix a rare preference loading bug
· Fix a bug causing SpiderOak to constantly reconnect when proxy password is set incorrectly
· Fix backup tab lag in the presence of floppy drives
· Fix a rare download bug
· Addition of LAN Sync
March 17th, 2012· Remove Windows Explorer "Favorites" category
· Fix out of memory issue caused by "Favorites" category
· De-duplicate backup selection when a folder is a part of multiple categories
February 3rd, 2012· Fix a bug causing client to hang in some circumstances when purging historical versions.
· Fix a bug preventing image previews from updating after deduplication.
· Fix local copy feature.
· Add --generate-previews command line option for generating previews for historical versions.
January 28th, 2012· Fix a refresh bug on the view page.
· Fix an issue with non-English characters in passwords.
December 22nd, 2011· Fix a bug where two devices may both think they're the first device to be added to an account.
· Fix a bug preventing selection of Windows "Favorites" on basic view when containing folders with non-English names.
· Fix a couple of bugs causing version building to go more slowly than it should for large files.
December 16th, 2011· Fixed a problem with some large filetypes that could lead SpiderOak to falsely conclude the file had been modified during backup.
· Fixed a bug in the basic view causing category selection to be incorrect if any of the default categories appeared in Windows Favorites
December 8th, 2011· Fix bug causing changes to backup selection to be lost if a transaction is committed or received from another device before the save button is pressed.
· Fix a bug present only in betas 9895 through 9901 which inadvertently writes the user's password to the local log files during new device setup.
December 5th, 2011· Fix a bug causing filesystem scan from looping during scheduled hour when backup schedule is enabled.
· Fix tree view bug on view tab when removing files.
· Fix some innocuous logging bugs.
November 29th, 2011· Fix a bug preventing image thumbnail information from being syndicated correctly across devices.
· Fix software update repository path on openSUSE.
· Fix bug that sometimes prevented SpiderOak from closing.
· Fix bug causing preferences to be lost when closing and reopening SpiderOak.
· Fix bug causing --purge-historical-versions command line option to remove too much data.
November 21st, 2011· Use fallback download locations on Windows when default locations not found
· Memory usage and performance enhancements during version building
· Fix various bugs in snapshot database causing extra space to be used
· Fix bugs in purge historical versions function
· Fix possible log filename collision race condition
· Print a message when blocked from running a second instance of the program
· Performance improvements for tree views on Backup and View tabs
· Reduced CPU usage during some status animations
· Fix error during account statistics calculation
· Added client-side preview generator to enable image thumbnails for web storage browsing
· New client setup process simplifies device creation
October 18th, 2011· Remove libssl dependency in deb builds.
· Preserve file modification time when syncing files with resource forks. This also fixes a sync feedback loop bug.
September 17th, 2011· Fix crash when running --fulllist command line option with international characters in filenames.
September 9th, 2011· Fix one more single instance lock bug.
July 18th, 2011· When the 'launch minimized at startup' preference was selected, the SpiderOak application would not actually run on Macs.
July 14th, 2011· Releases 4.0.9829 and 4.0.9830 did not work on PowerPC Macs. This has been fixed.
July 14th, 2011· Update root SSL certificate for web API access again for compatability with older Android phones that don't have the newer root certificates
July 14th, 2011· Update root SSL certificate for web API access
June 22nd, 2011· Released 9823 and 9824 as general release. No change from beta.
May 6th, 2011· Fixes a bug that sometimes prevents generation of a single-file-sharing URL.
· Enable the next button in the new user setup sequence when the activation code was autodetected.
April 22nd, 2011· Fix a bug preventing some users from being able to upgrade from some ancient versions of SpiderOak.
· Autodetection of activation code if it has been copied to the clipboard during first device activation sequence.
April 16th, 2011· Allow reinstall/repair during headless and batchmode operation.
· Fixed a number of out-of-memory errors when dealing with large data sets.
· Show top 50 space-consuming journals in stats output.
· Upgrade to Python 2.7.1, SQLite 3.7.5, and Qt 4.7 on all platforms (except OpenSUSE - coming soon) and architectures.
· Switched to a hybrid database format for client side storage which greatly reduces CPU and memory usage.
· Fixed a number of memory leaks.
· Fixed a crash bug that affected users of Mac OS X 10.5.
· Restructured the signup process to allow creating an account on SpiderOak.com.
March 24th, 2011· Fix Single Instance Lock on Windows (again).
· Fix a data serialization error that sometimes occurred on Mac OS X 10.5 during syndication.
· Fixed another instance of a minor bug causing misleading log messages after cancelling a download.
March 4th, 2011· Correction for a performance regression introduced in the previous beta series that could sometimes make syndication take unusually long
· Improved detection of already compressed files to avoid unnecessary CPU use for compression
December 27th, 2010· Fix a sync loop bug causing duplicate files with "1", "2", etc. appended to the filename
December 18th, 2010· More sync performance enhancements
· Replace more UI text graphic elements with vector versions
· Fixed a bug caused by syncing a file with an incredibly large number of data blocks
· Added --redirect commandline argument, allowing to specify a filename to redirect SpiderOak commandline output to a file. Especially useful on Windows.
November 23rd, 2010· Completely refactored the download code, resulting in better download and sync performance, reporting, and error handling, particularly for very large syncs and downloads
· Downloads now build incrementally in batches as the download proceeds, instead of waiting for all data blocks to be downloaded. This reduces the required local disk space available when completing very large downloads
· Better detection of user directories on some Linux systems
· A collection of fixes to directory watchers on Windows and Linux, including more graceful error recovery, avoiding some esoteric cases of notification recursion, and deduplicating many notification across short periods of time, preventing a rapidly changing folder from generating many notices
· Improve sync's handling of safe folder removal, to allow it to remove folders that have junk files in them, even if those junk files aren't backed up. (Junk files are things like Thumbs.db and .DS_Store). Previously SpiderOak Sync would refuse to remove the folder if there were ANY not backed up files in it
· Fix a bug causing sync to constantly recalculate in some rare situations
· Add run at startup preference for Linux
· Redact user password from log files when the preference option prompt for password on startup is enabled
· Replace many of the UI text graphics with attractive vector renderings, in preparation for internationalization
· A new small improvements to the command line UI
October 8th, 2010· Fix a rare sync bug when deleting folders, handling error messages when some items couldn't be removed
· Fix for a UI bug that could sometimes allow the "Next" button to be pushed twice during the device Reinstall sequence
· Give more information to the user when making the Setup choince for Reinstall vs. New Device
October 6th, 2010· Make it possible for SpiderOak clients to auto-recover from time-travel situations
· Greatly reduce memory requirements during new device setup or existing device reinstall, for accounts that have many millions of data blocks (very few do.)
· Ability to make SpiderOak client look more like the native OS: Enable this by setting the environmental variable SPIDEROAK_UI_STYLE to "Native". This also provides a workaround for a QT bug that prevented tooltips from appearing in Ubuntu. This is likely to become the default in the future.
· Correction for a rare Windows directory watcher bug that could sometimes cause the watcher to never exit. This only happened on file systems with nearly constant activity, such that the watcher would never become idle. Now the watcher checks occasionally for the parent process's existence even when busy. This will correct an occasional "Backend Worker Exit" on startup problem experienced by a few users.
· A few general improvements to memory usage and performance
August 12th, 2010· Fix another small bug with sync specific logging that was preventing some log messages from arriving in the logs.
August 10th, 2010· Fixed a bug with displaying remote devices on the View tab, where sometimes the name of the local machine instead of the remote machine would be shown
· Clarified some status bar messages and status tab text
· Fix a small bug with sync specific logging that was preventing some log messages from arriving in the logs
· Netbook screen-size adjustments for the UI
June 10th, 2010· Add a skipfilter that greatly reduces the CPU time and disk IO required for calculating sync actions in the most common case
· Linux inotify watcher: Make all buffers MAX_PATH_LEN instead of LINE_MAX
· Fix an error where some downloads would erroneously be reported as having errored, when they have not.
May 11th, 2010· Use HKEY_CURRENT_USER for Windows startup preference
· Enhanced self-healing capability for rare events where clients receive only partial transactions from other devices
· Improve read-ahead prediction, progress reporting, and caching for client uploads (we recently changed the order the server pulls data from the client)
· Fix for bbfreeze not applying site.py correctly on Linux (some Unicode preferences)
· Use a more robust unlink for temporary files created during download and sync file placement on Windows. (a temp file is created, the downloaded file is written, then renamed into place. Temp files could remain as litter if there was an error renaming the file followed by an EACCESS error removing the temp file.)
April 13th, 2010· New "Link" feature for single file sharing -- click on any file and ask the server for a URL that points to only this version of this file -- which you can paste into email, IM, blog posts, etc. to share the file. Links created in this way expire after 3 days. This feature was first added to the SpiderOak iPhone app where it is wildly popular and is now available in the desktop app as well. FYI - This works by the client sending single-scope decryption keys only for each of the data blocks in this version of this file. The server decrypts those blocks, and constructions a plaintext version of the linked file, and stores it for 3 days. It never stores the decryption keys (which only apply to the specific data blocks anyway.)
· Rework the Windows directory watcher to use an IO completion port. This eliminates the restriction on the number of folders that can be concurrently watched for changes.
· Add new preference for automatically running SpiderOak on login for Mac and Windows.
· Fix for a fantastically rare case in the sync logic where synced files would be sometimes be placed into adjacent folders instead of the correct folders.
· Fix a path handling bug on Windows that would sometimes make it difficult to Sync the root folder of a drive like z:\ as a synced folder.
· Correction for better behavior of the local backup queue quarantine for files that continuously cause errors (such as permissions problems or files that change while we are archiving them) during the backup process. The files still get archived after an appropriate delay.
· Display fix for Mac OS X backup tab display of rounded corners.
· Improved handling of errors when replacing the snapshot database that the GUI uses for a current view of the SpiderOak account.
· Performance improvement: avoid trying to revise the backup queue to find file moves and such when the queue is more than several thousand entries long.
· Fix a bug which would cause files removed from the backup by pushing Remove and choosing the "No longer backup revisions to this file" to continue to be excluded from the backup selection even if they were manually re-selected.
· Improvements to packaging for openSUSE
· Correction for spinning icons in the Status tab
January 22nd, 2010· Make the file system change watcher on OS X be a universal binary (it was until 9625...oops)
January 19th, 2010· Fix for a subtle bug in the Windows file system watcher.
· Fix for a build linkage problem with the OS X file system watcher that would cause problems on OS X 10.5.X (this problem was introduced in 9624).
· Fix for inotify file system watcher on Linux to more gracefully handle permission errors.
January 18th, 2010· Fix a frustrating Sync staging bug that would sometimes cause a sync to stop progressing before all actions had been completed.
· Fix a bug in the file system change notification interaction that could result in folders which should be excluded via wildcard preferences being included.
· Correction for an edge case in the Windows filesytem change notifier that would sometimes result in some changes being overlooked until the next scan.
· Several minor UI improvements.
· Supply more detail to automated crash reports in the case of the file system change notification process exiting abnormally.
January 9th, 2010· Prevent confusion in command line arguments: make --sync/backup/restore imply batchmode and batchmode imply headless
· GUI will now display an error message instead of crashing when a user attempts to remove multiple items, and those items don't exclusively consist of files and folders.
· SpiderOak now supports explicitly setting a location to store its database and log files with the SPIDEROAKDATADIR environment variable. This should be an absolute path pointing to a folder. The default location for this data folder is still %APPDATA%SpiderOak on Windows, ~/.SpiderOak on Linux, and ~/Library/Application Data/SpiderOak on Mac OS X.
· Catch an unusual error when ping lag testing can get out of sync between multiple pings and report negative lag values
· More graceful handling for cases where the directory walker cannot stat a directory (perhaps due to permissions or a race condition.)
· Avoid a bug in rebuilding the Transactional Storage System snapshot during the cases that top level files (like /filename.txt) were stored in the Transactional Storage System
· Catch IO errors when printing to standard out or standard error in --batchmode and its derivitives. Some users were running SpiderOak in scripts where stdout/stderr was not merely redirected to /dev/null but actually closed.
· Make the GUI always show the backup selection in Advanced mode, if the current backup selection is too sophisticated to be fully represented in Simple mode.
· Increase backend startup timeout from 240 to 360 seconds. Only extrodinarily large backup sets that contain hundreds of thousands of folders (the number and size of files does not matter, just folders) should take anywhere near this long to startup. This will be addressed in the next major version of SpiderOak when we switch to disk based trees.
· More graceful handling for a few more types of low level errors that can happen during the process of updating or adding files to the backup set.
· Add the display of the current version number to the splash screen
January 4th, 2010· Syncs now do not apply deleted events that happened in the folders included in a sync before the time the source folder was added to the sync.
· On Windows, sync will no longer apply deletion events that happen to match a legacy Windows "short" filename (the old 8 character filenames, like "My Docu~1" instead of "My Documents".) Files or folders that are unfortunate enough to match the pattern of a legacy name will be left for users to delete manually.
· Fix for the Linux dir watcher to not crash when it encounters a file that is really a socket.
· Aovid importing ctypes on linux because it breaks seliux enforcing execmem
· Make the GUI always close any file search dialog in progress in advanced backup view when switching to simple backup view
· Correction for a display bug that would sometimes cause the storage bar not to refresh
· Correction for user interaction bug that could sometimes cause the advanced backup view to revert to an older selection
· Fixes for some field-stretching display issues that could cause the size of UI windows to grow larger than necessary
· Better sanity checking for user preferences (now verifies on save AND load, and catches a wider variety of preferences errors.)
December 18th, 2009· Fix a buffer handling bug with the Windows dir watcher that would sometimes cause it to report changes for erroneous folders.
· Fix bug causing SpiderOak not to honor proxy server settings during New User Setup.
June 13th, 2009· Corrected a bug in the UI when loading shares that previously contained folders from a deleted device.
June 13th, 2009· Refactored New User Setup sequence.
· Installing SpiderOak now gives the option to replace (reinstall) an existing device within your account (as well as create new ones.)
· You may now re-use the names of previously deleted devices when adding new devices.
· Greatly improved performance of loading device's folder tree's into memory. (this will go to almost 0 for arbitrarily large trees in the next release.)
· Greatly improved performance of receiving downloaded items
· Greatly improved performance of decoding downloaded items
· Greatly improved performance and robustness of --repair operations
· Moderately improved performance for rebuilding folder view and the reference database as a whole.
· Fix for Linux/KDE Users that prevented SpiderOak from being able to launch browser windows.
· Fixed an obscure error involving a resource fork that was identical to its data fork moved between two folders twice.
· Fixed a similar obscure error involving purging resource forks.
· Fixed an obscure bug that was causing SpiderOak's sequentially numbered container files to skip some sequence numbers (harmless but odd.)
· The command line option --destroy-shelved-x is no longer considered dangerous because it now coordinates dropping shelved transactions with the server. This maybe used to abort uploads that have already reached the stage of established transactions.
· Enable recovery from an incredibly rare race condition where the same data block is concurrently referenced on one device as another device purges it.
· More graceful handling of file systems that erroneously report multiple versions of the same file with the same timestamp or timestamps absurdly in the future.
· A fix for Sync occasionally misinterpreting a series of moving a file out of and then back into a folder as a delete
· More (much bigger) performance improvements coming up soon!
February 6th, 2009· Added more information to the changelog display
· A couple new command line options: specifying output folders, operations on remote devices, and more control over commandline backup and restore.
· Fixes for several small bugs encountered during the beta.
· Improved progression of display of backup items in the Status tab.
· Added Auto-Login links to the SpiderOak User Forum: You may now auto-login to the forum using your existing SpiderOak account. Do this by choosing Help -> User Forums from the client application menu. On Ubuntu, this is found by contextual click on the SpiderOak menubar icon.
January 12th, 2009· Corrects a few minor bugs in 2.2.0 - for most users, an upgrade is not needed.
December 22nd, 2008· A correction for how busy files in Windows were displayed in the status queue.
· Improvements to the backup queue sorting process.
· Fixed a problem with updating the journal info for 0 byte files.
· Detect and recover from the very unusual case that download data blocks are lost by the local filesystem during the course of an active download.
· A correction for slowness in syndicating very very large transactions between devices.
December 16th, 2008· Support for renaming and permanently removing existing devices from your SpiderOak account.
· Changes to how space usage is accounted and reported for duplicate files. It used to be that the first folder to ever store a duplicate file was considered to have used that space, and all other folders storing the same file would use zero space. We now use an "earliest existing reference" system of space accounting to find the first folder (all others still use zero space.)
· Bugfixes with regard to deleting and updating zero byte files
· New configurable preference: Time interval between filesystem scans for new backup items
· New configurable preference: Do not show the Splash/Intro screen at startup.
· New configurable preference: Start SpiderOak with the UI Minimized. Unfortunately, due to uneven QT support across all platforms, this is currently only available on Windows. This is the first time we've ever had a feature inconsistency between platforms, and we'll work to get this functional on Ubuntu and OS X shortly (we normally build new features on Mac/Ubuntu first and then port them to Windows.) For unattended operations the usual --headless and --batchmode command line options still work everywhere.
· New configurable preference: Always Ask/Minimize/Quit when closing.
· New configurable preference: Exclude wildcards from the backup config
· New configurable preference: Connect using a HTTP proxy server. We've supported using a proxy server for connections for a long time, but now you don't have to use environmental variables to configure it (although the ENV still works.)
· Significant speedups to the filesystem tree hierarchy code, improving performance on systems with 20,000+ folders.
· Improvements to memory consumption when conducting very large backups
· Larger backup items are now placed at the end of the backup queue so smaller items will upload more quickly
· Cleanups in the download dialog status display
· Improvements to detecting and working around lagging or throttled network connections
· A correction for database file handling when a Windows username contains certain unicode characters
· A fix for a rare startup crash relating to UI &backend negotiation
November 25th, 2008· Added newest Ubuntu release to supported / tested platforms: Intrepid Ibex
· This is mostly a bugfix release for 2.0.x series versions. New features are coming soon in 2.2.
· Performance of the download queue is greatly improved for downloading folders, especially those containing 10,000+ items
· Make the status bar make it more obvious for new users that they need to verify their email address before SpiderOak will begin uploads.
· Improvements to handling situations where a user might concurrently remove the same folder multiple times, from multiple machines within their account.
· Fix for a log rotation bug on Windows: If another program was reading a SpiderOak log file, the OS would prevent its rotation, and SpiderOak did not recover from this situation properly, resulting in log buffer data being kept in memory and spiking memory use.
· Fix for some rare crashes on initial launch
· Improvements to load balancing within SpiderOak's server side storage network
· Fix for a problem with in exception traceback logging while scanning
· Allow SpiderOak to automatically recover from snapshot database corruption.
· Greatly improve performance of status reporting on uploading items
August 16th, 2008· Connectivity improvements: The Network Health meter should give more reliable indications of lag. Also improves handling of detecting broken connections even when the OS never reports the connection as having failed.
· Show Windows 'system' files as well as 'hidden' files when using the 'show hidden files' view for backup selection.
· Greatly reduced memory usage for uploading new transactions and reconstructing downloaded items.
· Performance improvements for data de-duplificiation code.
· Corrections for some rare crashes on initial startup.
· Improvements for user interface handling of downloads of folders with many thousands of files.
· Improved error handling and reporting when scanning filesystem for changes.
· Better detection of deleted folders on external drives and network volumes.
· Correction for a rare syndication problem involving generating the changelogs for trees with recursive purges.
· Scanning used to abort on Windows when encountering folders with unusual permissions. Instead these folders are skipped and the scan continues.
· UI text added in the device list area, informing users who only have one device using SpiderOak, that SpiderOak supports multi computer backup without additional costs.
May 7th, 2008· SpiderOak is now offering 'forever' accounts. You make a one time payment, and your account remains active in perpetuity. Your SpiderOak share rooms stay online, your data is forever accessible. The account does not expire due to inactivity, or the death of the owner.
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