Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on VaultSync 1.8.6.
After 1.8.5 focused heavily on recovery confidence, I wanted this update to be less about adding more features and more about making the features already there easier to understand.
The question I kept coming back to was:
Can VaultSync tell me what it is doing, what happens next, and what actually needs my attention without making me dig through several pages?
That became the focus of 1.8.6: Everyday Clarity.
The Dashboard is much more recovery-first now
The old Dashboard had plenty of useful information, but too much of it had roughly the same visual importance.
I’ve reorganized it around four questions:
- Is my data currently recoverable?
- Which project needs attention first?
- When should automatic protection run next?
- What is the latest recovery point I explicitly marked as known good?
Those are now the first things you see, with direct paths into Recovery, Schedule and History.
Storage, activity and trend information is still there, but it sits below the things that are more likely to require an actual decision.
Scheduling finally gets its own proper page
This was probably overdue.
A configured backup interval does not necessarily mean “VaultSync will write a backup exactly every X minutes.”
Quiet hours, battery restrictions, paused projects, unavailable destinations and even the fact that nothing changed can all affect what actually happens.
The new Schedule page tries to explain that instead of pretending scheduling is just a timer.
It shows things like:
- Whether automatic protection can run right now
- The next timer opportunities
- Quiet-hours delays
- The saved interval
- Which projects actually participate in automatic backups
- The latest automatic backup
- Any restrictions currently delaying work
Schedule and Settings also use the same underlying configuration now.
The idea is that Schedule tells you what will happen, while Settings is still where the more advanced policy lives.
Project folders now actually behave like folders
This is another area that needed simplification.
Folders are completely optional. If you never use them, Projects still behaves like the normal flat list.
If you do use them, membership is now explicit. VaultSync does not try to guess where a project belongs from tags, names or paths.
You create a folder, select a project, choose the destination folder, review what will happen, and then explicitly move it.
Changing a dropdown no longer instantly rearranges the page.
Once moved, the project appears inside the folder only instead of being duplicated in the top-level list.
That sounds obvious written down, but the previous behavior was much closer to a filter than a real folder system.
Expanded folders now also give a quick summary of:
- Total projects
- Healthy projects
- Projects needing attention
- Paused projects
And you can perform folder-level actions such as backing everything up, creating snapshots, pausing automatic backups, renaming the folder, or removing the folder.
Deleting a folder does not delete projects, source files, snapshots or backups. The projects simply return to the main list.
Project editing is less scattered
The project details panel now brings together more of the settings I previously had spread across different places.
You can see and edit things like the destination, snapshot preset, folder, tags, encryption policy and automatic-backup participation alongside health, storage and snapshot information.
Removing a project is also clearer about what actually gets removed.
VaultSync unregisters the project and its local history/index state. It does not delete the source directory or the stored backup data.
Backup activity should be easier to understand too
One slightly less visible change is that backup progress now uses the same activity states everywhere.
VaultSync can consistently distinguish between:
Queued → Scanning → Hashing → Writing → Verifying → Waiting → Retrying → Completed
as well as cancelled and failed states.
This mainly fixes situations where the main copy operation had finished but hashing or verification was still happening and the UI made that look like unrelated background work.
Recovery is still the centre of the app
Nothing from the recovery-confidence work in 1.8.5 is being replaced.
VaultSync still keeps measured evidence, simulations, inferred conditions and user-confirmed information separate.
Missing destinations, credentials, verification or restore drills still count as real blockers rather than being hidden inside a nice-looking percentage.
What 1.8.6 changes is how easy that information is to reach.
Recovery state now feeds much more directly into Dashboard, Projects, History and Schedule.
Onboarding has had another pass too
The first-run flow is now smaller, resumable, and tied to actual application state.
It follows the whole protection loop:
Source → Destination → Project → Schedule → Recovery point → Recovery drill
I’ve also expanded the Guide so terms like snapshot, backup, restore point, verification, known-good point and recovery drill are defined consistently instead of assuming everyone interprets them the same way.
There’s quite a bit happening underneath this too
A lot of 1.8.6 is cleanup that is less interesting to screenshot:
- Safer installer and patch handling
- Tighter external-link restrictions
- Better metadata refresh behaviour
- Diagnostics for failures that previously disappeared silently
- Schedule and project-folder code cleanup
- Updated app/repository branding
- Coordinated macOS, Windows and Linux builds
Release plan
At the moment I’m preparing 1.8.6 as a direct stable release, so there will not be a separate 1.8.6 beta.
Before I finish it, I’d particularly like opinions on a few things:
- Does the new Schedule page make automatic backups easier to understand?
- Does moving projects into folders now feel predictable?
- Is there too much or too little information inside an expanded folder?
- Do the first Dashboard cards match the things you actually care about?
- Is there anywhere VaultSync still changes state or moves something in a way you did not expect?
A lot of this update came from features that were technically working correctly but were not doing a good enough job of explaining themselves.
That is mostly what I’m trying to fix with 1.8.6.