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Mac Software Development and Pascal

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Once again helpful users have been kind enough to share their thoughts with me so I know which direction to develop Warehouse in. Without a doubt the most requested feature is better status reporting during backups which means a progress bar. I agree 100% and it’s annoying to not know how much longer the task will take especially on large backups. I didn’t include this in 1.0 even though it was an obvious feature because it presented some technical issues with rsync but I’ll put in the extra effort this time to make sure it’s done right. ;)

The second issue is little out of my hands but clearly needs some work. Some users have reported getting various warnings from the UNIX utility rsync which Warehouse uses to do most of the work. Warehouse will display these for you but I believe they’re not always useful and there should be an option to ignore warnings (by selecting them individually, not a global omission of all errors). However some of the errors users reported were preventing files from being backed up but unfortunately I can only provide limited support as they are not technically from Warehouse and I may not be familiar with them myself.

Finally a lack of error reporting with scheduled backups needs to be addressed soon but oddly enough I haven’t received any complaints here so it may appear in a later version. If a backup fails during scheduling it will report it as completed even though rsync may have failed to complete the process for any number of reasons. I hope this hasn’t confused anyone yet!

    Today marks the release of Warehouse 1.0 (http://www.warehouseosx.com/).  Please send all comments and feature request that you may have, we love to hear these.

    Any people interested in supporting your native language by localizing Warehouse will receive a free copy and updates for life along with the glorious fame!

    Version 1.0 is the first step and already a few key new features are planned:

    • Fully bootable backups. I suspect this will be requested often…
    • FTP destinations. I have already developed a script for WebScripter which will make mirror copies of files on an FTP server and local disk which I will implement into Warehouse. The uploading/downloading will be slow like any FTP transfers but a handy tool for backing up files to remote servers.
    • ZIP archives. I’m not exactly sure how this will work yet but ZIP’ing archives makes a lot of sense since this is how people backup sometimes. Any suggestions are welcome.
    • Error logs. The backup log is handy for keeping track of backups that were performed in the background via scheduling but there are no reports of errors. This will be improved upon soon.
    • Multiple destinations. This feature will depend on people requesting it but I think backing up to multiple destinations at once would be nice for some scenarios.

    Please let us know what other features/improvements you would like to see to make Warehouse a better tool for your needs.

    warehouse

    A new backup application named Warehouse is currently in the final stages of development and planned to be released soon.

    As of  10.5 Leopard Apple has released a great backup utility called TimeMachine which will keep incremental backups of your entire hard disk on a schedule of your choice. This may be appropriate for many users but for myself it’s overkill and too much of a “one size fits all” solution, like the one button mouse I haven’t used in many years.

    Instead of relying on a single button, single backup interface Warehouse uses a task based system which lets you backup based on a task-per-task basis using a variety of backup modes (not just incremental archiving like TimeMachine) and unique destination devices (any mountable device even Macs connected via network). This means that you only backup the files you need, where you want thus saving time and disk space. The real power of Warehouse comes from setting up scheduled backups that run in the background (you can even keep the application closed if you want) so all your data is safely backed up while you work.

    As was mentioned Warehouse doesn’t just create incremental archives like TimeMachine but uses other modes as well such as: updating (only new files are transferred), bidirectional synching (both new files on the source and destination are transferred) and synchronizing (newer files are transferred and missing files are deleted on the destination). This makes Warehouse an ideal solution for synchronizing folders across Macs or on removable media like USB memory sticks.

    For only $9.99 you can get more control over how you backup your files.

    Please visit the website for more information.