We're happy to announce that SecretSync is now officially out of beta. That means we've made it to version 1.0 (technically, version 1.261), and have moved out of the beta stage. We've had thousands of users try the beta, and have gotten high quality feedback from many. So we want to take a moment to thank everyone who has shown interest in the product, and for those who helped us troubleshoot and track down bugs. We couldn't have gotten here without you.
Below are a few of the important changes that have occurred in the transition from beta to release.
Safer decrypt-on-copy & encrypt-on-copy
Beta testing brought some problems to light in regard to failure during decryption. Primarily, in some (fairly rare) cases, a decryption error could occur that deleted the existing non-encrypted file. We've taken steps to address these issues. Now, an intermediate file is used during the copy-decrypt and copy-encrypt procedures, and if there is any failure during encryption or decryption, the target file is untouched. The integrity of your data is and always will be a primary objective in our design.
Improved sleep/wake algorithm
With file synchronization, you must try to find a balance between responsiveness and performance. I.e. you are trying to quickly detect and handle changes in the file system while keeping CPU cycles and disk reads to a minimum. Our approach is to monitor usage and build statistics to find a balance between these two. During the beta phase we were able to monitor, get feedback, tweak, and generally improve how we are synchronizing the SecretSync folder. This release includes the results of our work and provides the most stable, low-impact, and responsive folder monitoring of our releases to date.
Bugfixes and optimizations
During the beta stage we improved our test suite and pressured SecretSync to see if any problems emerged. A few edge cases fell out, such as directory modified time conflicts, and these are now handled appropriately by SecretSync. (The case we demonstrated would actually be pretty hard to do in practice, but we want SecretSync to be as robust as possible, even if the scenario is unlikely.) Based on feedback and issues by users throughout the beta period, we've identified and patched various small bugs, and we are now confident that SecretSync is ready for prime time. We hope you find that to be the case as well.
Subscriptions
Now that we've reached a stable release version, we've enabled our subscription tiers. You can purchase a subscription through PayPal. More information is available on the Pricing page. Subscriptions start at the free level, which costs nothing and allows you to synchronize 2 GB of data.
Upgrading
If you are already a user of the beta, there is no need to uninstall. For Windows and Mac OS X, simply download the current version, and run the install. Do not uninstall first.
If you are on Linux, follow the instructions for upgrading at this link.
