A few weeks ago I shared the roadmap and some very early mockups for what I was calling Project History & Recovery.
At the time it was mostly ideas, planning documents, rough UI concepts and a lot of notes.
Since then I've started building it.
These are still early development builds and there's a lot left to do, but this is the first point where 1.8 is starting to feel like an actual release rather than a collection of ideas.
One thing that became obvious very quickly is that both History and Recovery are much bigger pieces of work than they looked on paper.
The History page started life as what I thought would be a fairly simple timeline.
It didn't stay simple for very long.
Once I started wiring real repository activity into it, it became clear that backups, imports, restores, notes, protected versions and known-good versions all have relationships to each other.
Treating everything as a flat list loses a lot of context.
The current implementation uses a graph-style timeline where events branch from their source. A restore branches from the backup that created it. Imported history branches from the snapshot it originated from. Notes and labels attach themselves directly to the point in history they belong to.
It's heavily inspired by how Git clients visualize history, but applied to backup activity rather than source control.
Recovery has been interesting for a different reason.
Most backup software is very good at telling you whether a backup completed.
What I'm trying to explore is whether VaultSync can eventually tell you whether you're actually protected.
Right now the Recovery page is pulling together backup history, destination availability and project health information to build an early recovery readiness view.
The scoring is still evolving and a lot of the logic will change as development continues, but the foundation is there.
So far the work completed includes:
- History and Recovery navigation
- Metadata support for labels, notes, tags, protected versions and known-good versions
- Data-backed History and Recovery pages
- Timeline graph infrastructure
- Protected snapshot actions
- Known-good version actions
- Recovery readiness previews
- Recovery coverage previews
There have also been a handful of unrelated fixes along the way, including Linux update improvements, macOS fixes and project reload reliability improvements.
There’s still a lot of work to do, plenty of rough edges, and things will definitely change before release.
But it’s nice to finally be able to show something real.
I'll keep sharing progress as things move forward. There is still a lot of work ahead, but this is probably the first update where I can look at 1.8 and actually start seeing the release come together.