We didn’t expect to find such a huge problem so early after our release, but there was a big problem when SharedSafe was used together with GMail servers. On GMail, SharedSafe was not effectively deleting unused Emails, and may have already reduced your free GMail space by a substantial amount. This happened because GMail has some very specific behaviors baked in to their IMAP servers we did not anticipate.
Now, with this update, unused Emails should be deleted properly.
But we can not fix this problem for your existing Linked Folders that are synchronized with a GMail server. Your data is safe, and you can continue to use the Linked Folders, but to free all the mails that GMail has kept in the archive, some manual work is required:
Use the GMail web application to mark all SharedSafe Emails that are existing outside the “All Mails” folder. The folder / tag names should be named similar to your linked folders or have the prefix “Shared Files”.
Then move all the Emails received from “SharedSafe” <
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> that are existing in the (All Mails) folder and are not marked to the trash.
Empty the trash.
If the steps above are not working for you, we recommend a complete reconfiguration:
Use SharedSafe’s Configuration tool to unlink all folders that synchronize to a GMail safe.
Also delete all GMail Safes in the Configuration Tool.
Use the GMail web application and move all remaining Emails from “SharedSafe” <
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> to the trash. Then empty the trash to finally free up the space.
Recreate all Linked Folders by using SharedSafe’s context menus. SharedSafe will automatically start uploading your files again.
We are sorry for that and hope that we won’t need to send out any more horror stories. If you have any trouble following the steps above or need help to resolve this or any other problem with SharedSafe, we are here to assist you.
Today, we released the first version of SharedSafe, of which we think is stable for general use.
From now on, SharedSafe can be downloaded and used for free for 30 days. After 30 days it continues to synchronize your folders, but it will not upload files anymore.
To (re-)enable the Upload feature, you need to buy a SharedSafe license from our pricing page.
Many thanks go to our Alpha and Beta Testers. If you submitted a bug report, please contact us to get a free license for SharedSafe.
Of course we will be happy about every new trial user and customer of SharedSafe. Whatever your experience may be, please share your opinion or any idea, so that we are able to shape SharedSafe into a file syncing and sharing solution you are going to love.
This update contains mainly bug fixes and performance optimizations.
Error Handling
We tried to improve the Error Handling and some minor details which were annoying to some of our users. For example, the thumbs.db file shouldn’t be an issue anymore when you synchronize your pictures with SharedSafe. Additionally, the Error Handling itself was slightly broken and should be fixed now. Error messages should only be reported once with the current version.
Provider Compatibility
And then we had some time to (re)test SharedSafe with some of the big IMAP providers. While the new synchronization engine is working great, we found and fixed incompatibilities with Yahoo’s and Arcor’s IMAP servers. So with this new release, SharedSafe should be able to talk with them just fine.
Performance
The new synchronization engine is using a local database to store the intermediate states of all file changes. Changes to this database were quite slow and caused SharedSafe to perform really poor on some hard drives. With this version, we’ve changed the transaction writing policy to a slightly less safe method, which improved the performance a lot. The database itself is just a cache and can be rebuilt at any time. So even when the power is lost in the midst of an ongoing synchronization, SharedSafe should not be in trouble as long the file system has not been corrupted.
For more details, you can always take a look at our Change History.
Outlook
Our next step is to actually release SharedSafe. YES! :) We’ve already prepared the pricing table, completed the purchase workflow and are now waiting for our End User License Agreement to be finalized in the next few days.
We hope that you like our product. It’s the first of its kind and it’s a little different to what you are being used to until now. So treat it with some decency and it will keep your files private, encrypted and safe in the cloud of your choice.
It took us a while to rewrite the synchronization engine for SharedSafe and now we feel it is ready to use. With the latest release (0.8 beta), we enabled the new engine by default and revised a number of details we hope you are going to like.
So first, what does this new synchronization engine offer? Here are a the highlights:
It is more responsive. Changed files are detected much faster and are uploaded earlier. The Explorer overlay icons reflect the current state of the files much more precisely.
It is faster for small files. Small files which were stored in the same Email are downloaded at once.
It supports uploads and downloads at the same time. While files are uploaded, it can download changes from other users simultaneously.
It uses less CPU time to check for new files. The old engine had a design flaw which made the check for new files quite CPU intensive. The new engine should not take noticeable CPU time as long it is just checking for new files.
It is able to handle a lot more files. Though we had no time yet to test and optimize the effective performance, the new engine is designed to handle a lot more files and changes.
The new engine supports all features of the old one except file rename and move detection. If you think you need these features, please send us feedback.
Transfer Status
Up until now SharedSafe missed a bit of transparency, specifically when larger files were uploading or downloading.To fix that, we built a new transfer status view which is integrated in the tray window and shows the files, their progress and transfer speed:
More
Besides a number of smaller changes, it is now possible to backup and restore all folder configurations at once (the exported files, of course, are encrypted):
We hope you like this release and, as always, we are looking forward to your feedback.
