I Don't Want To Back Up!

One step backwards, two forwards?

2010-03-21T17:09:00.002Z

I have a bit of a dilemma. I want to start pushing the advertising of NeverOverwrite again but I'm not happy with one of its current limitations. In the early days (around beta time) a user suggested adding support for subfolders when choosing to begin monitoring a folder. I added this in a rather loose way, but I've never been entirely happy with it.

The reason being, there are several scenarios in which the previous versions of files can appear to vanish. Examples are; moving a file to another subfolder, renaming a subfolder, or moving a subfolder to another subfolder. These are instances where the software currently loses track of the history of the files, and it's too easy to do in my opinion. I have done it myself, and while it's pretty easy to correct (by undoing the move or rename) it's far from perfect.

I've spent some time analysing all the scenarios I can think of and I've come up with 9 that aren't presently handled. Of these 7 can be handled fairly easily but 2 are not straightforward.

For example, moving a monitored file to another subfolder is a scenario in which the user would (quite rightly) expect the history of the file to follow the file itself. But moving a file results in a series of Windows events (not just one) which are not easy to differentiate from the user deleting a file, and creating a new one in another folder which happens to have the same name.

There are some strategies I can use in all these scenarios, but they will take time to implement and test, and I don't believe it's the best use of my time at this stage. I would rather get a solid product released, with a more polished and reliable feel before moving on to this work.

So I've taken the decision to roll back the subfolder support until a later date when 1) I know it can be done, and 2) there's enough users of the current version to justify the work.

Hopefully this is a step back that will get me two steps forward in the long run.

New trial model

2010-03-16T12:50:00.000Z

A few days ago I uploaded a new version which has been in the works since the end of last year. It’s been amazingly difficult (but not entirely surprising) to find the time to work on NeverOverwrite since I signed up to a new contract in Southampton (100+ miles from home).The work has gone in dribs and drabs.

So what’s changed? Well unless you’re coming to the software as a new user you may not notice too much. The trial model has turned literally on its head from where it was. It used to stop monitoring after 30 days when the trial expires, but still allow users to access the previous versions. A few users who have kindly taken the time to respond to my requests for feedback made me realise that perhaps this isn’t the best way to acquire new customers!

The latest version will carry on monitoring your files, and saving all the versions even after it expires. The difference is you can’t access these versions once expired (Preview and Drag’n’drop are disabled). I think this is a fair deal, we shall see how it is received. The whole trial system is also slightly less naggy (only one reminder per day, and none inside the first 3 days) and the user can register by selecting “Register...” on any NeverOverwrite context menu instead of only being able to do this via the Previous Versions window.

There’s also a new menu option “Tell us something...” which is available on the Previous Versions window. I want to make it as easy as possible for users to give me feedback on what they are finding painful, or fruitful! Rather than them having to go to the website and dig out the email address, compose an email etc. (which personally puts me off), clicking this menu option will take them straight to a contact form on the site, 3 easy fields (name & email optional) and one click to send the feedback. I hope that’s easy enough!

In fact the contact form has meant I can finally get rid of the email addresses on the website which has been causing me some sleepless nights (ok not literally). Even more so recently as I’ve had the odd email pop through about certain “performance enhancing” blue pills, always a worrying sign...

join the Queue

2009-10-07T13:10:00.001+01:00

A few users have been asking for some improvements in the overall speed when monitoring large folders. I hadn't really anticipated people using NeverOverwrite for monitoring anything other than say Microsoft Office type documents. But several of you are routinely using it for monitoring folders of around half a gig(!) with photo's etc. While the database NeverOverwrite uses scales very well (I've tested it with several gigabytes of test files, constantly adding and retrieving) the user experience was far from ideal since when first instructing NeverOverwrite to monitor the large folder, it must wait until the initial versions of all files are saved in the database before continuing. For Half a gig this can take a couple of minutes as you can imagine. All this manifested as a huge perceived delay when clicking on the "Start Monitoring" button.

Happily I can now announce this is a thing of the past! These large processes are now queued to be processed in the background and NeverOverwrite will now return straight away with "... now monitoring your folder" message. You can even tell it to monitor other folders straight away, these being added to the queue. Note though that if you open a Previous Versions window somewhere, and a large background task is running, you'll be shown the Previous Versions dialog with the version list greyed out. The version list will automatically be enabled and show the file versions when the background tasks are complete (no need to click the Retry button).

I'm hoping this will make the user experience a bit more palatable when dealing with these big folders. Give the new version a go if you're one of these "power users" :) Version 1.0.11.0 with the changes in was added Sunday 4th October. Uninstall you current version if you have one (opting to keep your data files). Also a restart of Windows is required after installing the new version in order to pick up all the changes.

Feel free to comment on how you find it!

Generating more traffic to your MicroISV

2009-07-14T13:37:00.000+01:00

After much searching around for a good solid starter resource for getting traffic to your microISV site I found the following:

http://www.followsteph.com/how-to-generate-traffic-to-your-website.html

Steph's blog has been around for a long time and the eBook isn't advice from a fly-by-night but really solid and practical. Importantly for me I can read and digest it in a day. Some other resources looked good but were so wordy I doubt I'd get through it before losing interest in the whole idea! Definitely a recommended purchase (I'm not affiliated).

On becoming more visible

2009-07-14T13:27:00.003+01:00

The price of NeverOverwrite went up a few days ago. I was a bit concerned this would put people off buying it but having done some research on similar apps out there it actually fits in quite well with the average price now.

I've also done a round of registering the software on shareware sites. Most of these I doubt your average user will ever visit, but for the links back to neveroverwrite.com they are valuable. It's also a nice feeling seeing your software listed on another site for the first time :) I can recommend RoboSoft which I used to do the job. It's not quite as "automatic" as I'd hoped, still requiring a few hours work, but the end result is your software registered on hundreds of sites.

One happy outcome is that today when i google "neveroverwrite" I have taken over the page one results. This wasn't the case even just a few weeks ago, google would say "did you mean 'never overwrite'?" etc.

I've also shortened the trial period to 30 days. While 45 days made a lot of sense to get people used to the software, it makes less sense from a business point of view. All those extra 2 weeks add up. 30 days seems to be the industry standard and I don't think it will stop users installing and trying out the software.

Reviewers wanted

2009-07-06T20:32:00.001+01:00

Anyone interested in writing a quick review of NeverOverwrite? If you have somewhere visible to post it and you’d like to write a small review for public consumption then drop me a line. There’s a free license in it for you :)

Increase price for more sales obvious move(!)

2009-07-06T20:05:00.004+01:00

The world works in a strange way, I am coming to believe. Ever since I asked the joelonsoftware forum for an opinion my neveroverwrite site i’ve had comments that the software is too cheap. I am slowly coming round to the logic that having a sub-20 dollar program might give out the message that neveroverwrite is a cheapie fly-by-night product - which it isn’t (some serious work went into it readers!). The original idea was to make it so cheap people wouldn’t think about parting with a few bob to have it in their tool kit. But since sales have been so slow (zero to date) could this counter-intuitive step actually work? Or could it hurt potential sales? Well I guess so but since everyone to date seems quite happy to run the trials down I can’t be too worried about that.

I’m blogging about it as I’ve decided to put the price up to $29.95 in what feels like a bold-time-will-tell move. This will probably happen in the next few days so if you want to take advantage of the current price then get your orders in now folks.

Next is the matter of if the 45 day trial is too long... hmm

Tips on keeping versions trimmed

2009-06-20T00:18:00.000+01:00

I’m monitoring a file at the moment which I’m making lots of changes to. It’s a text file that I keep adding to and taking away from whilst I build up a list of blogging sites to look at (with text notes after each one). It’s a perfect candidate for NeverOverwrite since there’s stuff coming out of it I might later realise I need. I’m finding it easier to manage the list of versions by keeping a the Previous Version dialog open in the background. After I save a new version of my file, I Alt-Tab to the Previous Version dialog, click the refresh button, and check last the version was added. At this point I can trim the list a bit so only the versions I really need remain in the list, the important versions and not all the clutter.

Works quite well for me. I’m starting to think it would be nice to add a “Notes” column too, so I can label any version with a text comment – what do people think?

Roadmap

2009-06-16T13:57:00.000+01:00

There's been a few requests on the email for features and I've tried to gather them together rationally in a plan for the next few minor version updates. I say minor but they're pretty good features I feel. Particularly being able to look at the files that have been deleted in a folder, and browsing the versions of each deleted file!

Some users are requesting more options to delete versions too. Though you can delete individual versions presently, it would be nice to have more control over this. I think part of the reason for these suggestions is people are concerned about this the size of the repository growing large. So in 1.3 there will be a way of controlling the number of versions saved (either by date, number of versions, or size) which I'd always planned to do and it does make the whole solution more solid.

Summary of the roadmap below. I can't give a time for these as at the moment I'm looking for the next C# consultancy gig to fund more work on NeverOverwrite. Or even better, some sales!

1.1

"Browse Deleted Files..." on the context menu of a monitored folder
"Purge All Versions" on the context menu of a file in a monitored folder
"Purge All Versions" button on the Monitor Settings dialog (removes all versions from a folder)
"Preview With..." option in the Previous Versions dialog to use another application other than the default (this may become "Send To...")

1.2

"Link to Deleted Versions by Filename" option on the Monitor Settings dialog (workaround for issue of Windows copy/replace appearing to remove a files history)
Allow monitored folders to stay monitored when moved

1.3

Monitor Settings dialog to allow control over the size of the repository

twittered

2009-06-16T01:36:00.003+01:00

twitter life begins... http://twitter.com/mcurriedev

Give me a normal application any day

2009-06-12T13:39:00.002+01:00

Work has been continuing at NeverOverwrite Towers in the last few weeks to iron out issues from the new group of users I've happily acquired. I think, and i hope i don't jinx it here, it's now looking pretty solid. I'm glad to have a firm base with which to build new features on. The software has been run in all sorts of scenarios I didn’t anticipate and alongside various other software(s) I could never have predicted, and inevitably there were some clashes.

In fact, I almost convinced myself some weeks ago that I'd far rather design and implement a standard Windows application which wasn't so influenced by external factors like the users Windows configurations and other software (virus checkers, security, etc.) in the way that NeverOverwrite is. This I feel is the drawback to designing shell extensions. They look fantastic because they appear to become a part of Windows and hence are easy to learn, but the flip side of this is they are affected by far more factors than a nice stand-alone app. That said it's been a fun challenge, and I’m sure it's not quite over yet either.

I‘ve just uploaded 1.0.9.0 which has a heartily recommended list of minor bug-fixes and tweaks. It also now comes with a Start -> Programs -> NeverOverwrite entry with an Uninstaller and link to a ‘Quick Start’ guide. I’d hoped to get away with no documentation because “It's so simple to use!” but I have to concede that’s true only to me (having designed the thing) and not necessarily new users.

Uninstall also now gives you the option of removing all saved file versions which it didn’t do previously.

This is a slight risk as for the moment you have to uninstall NeverOverwrite to upgrade to a new version. There’s always the chance someone might not read this properly and remove the versions they have saved. To that end there’s a very clear dialog at the end of the uninstallation warning users not to choose this option if they plan on upgrading or using NeverOverwrite in the future. I can’t really omit this option as users could potentially have a large unused database file on their system after uninstalling (not great).

I will be publishing a road map on the blog soon of the planned features to be added in 1.1 and 1.2. If you buy 1.0 of course you’re entitled to a free update to these features. And there are a lot of them! But please drop me a line (blog/email/forum) if you have any yourself. Don’t worry about suggesting things someone else may have, I’m used to it!

Layout issues fixed

2009-06-02T00:28:00.003+01:00

Came across a problem i've never encountered today. Two users reported having the bottom of the Monitor Folder dialog chopped off. After a good hour i finally managed to reproduce this and discovered it is nothing to do with the resolution the software is running under, but rather if the font DPI for windows has been altered. By default its 96 DPI but as the size of our monitors increase and the pixels get smaller, people are changing this to 120 or higher. This can affect layouts and i bet there's very few developers out there checking that their software still looks okay in all these modes.

Weirdly it was only affecting one dialog. That one i haven't figured out yet. Anyway it has now been addressed and version 1.0.6.0 is available to download tonight with the fix in.

A more reliable installer

2009-05-29T00:37:00.005+01:00

A new installer at last. And one which works with Vista UAC! I've re-written the installation using the standard Setup plus some custom actions for registering shell extensions and the windows service. If this means nothing to you then have a pat on the back from me and take the easier explanation of :- NeverOverwrite now installs without any annoying popup windows, and also in Vista with or without pesky user account control (the thing that pops up and asks you for permission every 5 minutes, which most of us turn off within minutes of first trying). There's a few more bug fixes in there too. Installation wise its all feeling a lot more solid.

I thought i'd give it a whirl in the new Win7 release candidate (the next version of Windows due out next year) and to my suprise it worked and passed my test script. An unexpected bonus to recoding the installer. Pat on the back for me then.

Installers & how one size never seems to fit all

2009-05-22T20:54:00.003+01:00

I've had some really interesting feedback over on the Joel of software forum. If you haven't heard of this I encourage you to take a visit. I've been following them since mid 2008 and the tips I've picked up there to help me with this project have been huge. There's a knowledgeable bunch of guys over there. The feedback on NeverOverwrite is on the whole quite positive. The concept is quite well received which is what I was hoping for. Version control isn't new but bringing it to people who up to now would not normally use it perhaps is.

Status of the software in the wild right now seems to be pretty good. There's been around 25 downloads of 1.0.3.0 with 2 potential issues raised; the installer in rare cases is not registering everything as it should (the instruction to monitor is not being confirmed), and there's also a layout issue on one dialog in certain resolutions. I'm working on the installer at the moment (which is a Wix installation, and not the easiest to debug). It's early days for the software but I'm generally happy that it has not got “too big” yet while the minor issues are being ironed out. There will be a lot more pressure for it to be perfect once (fingers crossed) the sales start.

Going Live

2009-05-17T23:10:00.007+01:00

At long last version 1.0 is online and available to evaluate AND purchase. (I did wonder at one point if this day would ever come!). The last job was to get a licensing model implemented. I've decided to go for a fairly generous 45 day unlimited trial. There's no restrictions on the software in this time, it works fully. I'm not keen on products that limit some key feature during the evaluation. I want users to really see the benefit of using this on a daily basis. It's also nag-free. I'm preaching and practising too as i've been running NeverOverwrite on my computer here in the office (and it's already saved my bacon once whilst editing the Html for the site).

Another incentive i wanted to add was the fact that it will still remain useful once the trial period expires. The monitoring of all folders stops, but you can still access all the previous versions made within that period with no restrictions. I don't want users thinking they've lost access to all those precious versions they've been working on! Also, why alienate a potential customer by displaying a message to the effect of "you must now pay or I won't work at all". I think its worth keeping the software semi-useful rather than be annoyingly restrictive.

Price-wise, well I've gone for the 19.95 dollar range (which is about £13.50 today to you Uk peeps) which is pretty reasonable for a lovely little useful application I feel, and it does reflect the fact it's in it's infancy and there's hopefully lots more to come in terms of features.

Anyone buying this version will be entitled to free updates for all 1.x versions which will be bug fixes and definitely some new features. So there's no reason to hold out for a later version :)

Now - the website is a bit rough round the edges at the moment (!) and the video demo needs creating. Which is all part of the scary job that's now next on the list...

marketing!

help!

The home run

2009-05-07T14:47:00.001+01:00

The second and hopefully final beta is online with a bunch of new features added. Not only do we have the Make Current option (described last post) but you can now also:

- delete any version from the previous versions list
- optionally monitor subfolders
- drag and drop versions out of the versions list

But the biggie of the last few weeks has definitely been the tracking of files when they are renamed. I still want users to see the previous versions as whatever filename they were at the time. Sounds fairly simple until you start thinking of scenarios like

1. user renames file "my cv.doc" renamed to "Old Cv.doc"
2. user renames file "new cv.doc" to "my cv.doc"

So here we have files that are occupying the same name at different versions in their lifetime. (Any number of files could have these intersecting filenames in their lifetimes). NeverOverwrite has to be fully capable of keeping files which shared filenames completely separate in the underlying storage.

To that end I had to bring forward the job of having the storage of versions done in a database, as opposed to the file system used in beta 1.0.1.0. This was quite a chunk of work! Fortunately there's an excellent lightweight open source database provider which has been around for some time which I have made use of. Another benefit is now the storage is one encrypted database file, which should make the security conscious folk a little happier.

Additionally there are safeguards added to prevent network drives being monitored. This might be a good feature to have in the future, right now it poses a lot of questions with how all kinds of scenarios are handled. For now only folders on fixed non-network drives can be monitored.

If you've used the first version of the beta you will need to uninstall it before trying this one and make sure the folder below is deleted (with all its content):

XP: "C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Application Data\NeverOverwrite"

Vista: "C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Roaming\NeverOverwrite"

Still avoiding overwrites

2009-04-08T11:41:00.006+01:00

After fixing a few bugs i've started on the list of feature requests. First one up is a Make Current option on the Previous Versions dialog. Clicking this will give you the following message:

Note the promise to the user that they will not lose any versions during what is effectively an overwrite. I do not want NeverOverwrite to ever be in a position where it overwrites the users files. But due to the way it works it's quite possible that while a Previous Versions dialog is open, another explorer window could be opened and the folder then Unmonitored. Then if the Make Current option is chosen this would then overwrite the file without the protection of our software.

I really want to avoid this scenario so i've added a last minute check in the Make Current process so that once the user confirms the action, we check if the folder is still monitored and stop with the following message should we discover the folder is no longer.

There is one final check that the current file is not already open in another application such as Word, in this instance the file cannot be overwritten and the user is told to close any applications that are using the file first.

I think that's about as defensive i can make what could normally be a risky process if done wrong. Job done.

A big thankyou

2009-04-01T15:30:00.003+01:00

Many thanks to everyone who downloaded and tested the software for me in the last two weeks. All the comments have been greatly appreciated. I now start the task of finishing version One incorporating the many comments!

My bug tracking sytem today has 11 bugs and 10 feature requests (7 of which will be in v1). Actually make that 10 bugs, i just zapped one before writing this blog.

I will hopefully get version 1.0.2.0 out soon, though i don't want to put a time on that at the moment. It will be a beta with a lot of fixes in it.

I'm also going to create an email list for all the beta testers shortly to keep you up to date with which bugs / features have been addressed in the current release. Look out for that.

Beta version unveiled

2009-03-15T23:23:00.011Z

There has been substantial progress in the last week. The Beta is now available for download. Screenshots are up, plus a few simple descriptions on what the software does. I put the progress down partly to now having a working product, and partly because I have been speaking to people about the idea more than before in the last week or two, and the reactions have been pretty positive. In fact I don't think I've had a negative response yet and I've discussed the idea with 10/12 people. Let's hope the software lives up to my bold claims(!). It does help finally having a website to showcase the screenshots. It's worth putting the effort into getting it looking professional from the start as it communicates what the product does a lot better than my ramblings, and i guess people know you're serious by that point.

The installer is still a little shakey for my liking. Its the bare minimum required to get it working. In XP everything works fine but when installing in Vista if User Account Control is enabled, the registering of the shell extensions (for NeverOverwrite's context menus) presently fails. I have my suspicions why but rather than burn time on that I've raised a new case in my spanking new bug tracking system and i'll get on with more pressing matters for now. Quite impressed with FogBugz, this evening I moved all my issues written in my notepad (which was becoming more and more difficult to keep track of) into their online system and raised 21 new cases. I had no idea I had that many plates spinning! It's taken a while but it's been a good head-clearing exercise. I can now get on with tackling them in the right order. FogBugz also provide a discussion forum which will hopefully be a hub for feedback on the beta version. There is no registration required and anyone can post comments.

I have version 1.0.1.0 uploaded to the site now and it has quite a few bug fixes in it. The main bug i was concerned with was the locking of Microsoft Word files while they were being edited. It's a contention scenario; Word locks the file while you edit it, but NeverOverwrite needs access to the file to make a copy of it (and post to the repository) which can also lock the file, then Word can't access it, etc. They fight it out, someone looses. I now have a fix i there and the whole thing seems a lot more stable. I've stress tested it by editing a document over a hundred times saving each time, and checking the versions are all saved and can be retrieved, which they can.

The site has moved on quite a bit and it's about where i need it to be for now. I will try and get the video uploaded this week once i've found a nice piece of software to turn it into a nice flash animation. Oh and i have to record it first. Other than that I don't see it changing too much while the beta is evolving. Before the "release", if and when that happens, i will spend a lot more time pruning and polishing. For now (i think) all the required links and information is there (let me know if not). I am thinking of adding one more link which directs straight to the bug tracking system itself so people can follow progress of the bugs. I will be having a look at that this week to see if its doable. For now the handful of beta testers can email of use the feedback forum.

NeverOverwrite running in Vista

2009-03-08T23:39:00.003Z

Installers... never again...

2009-03-08T23:03:00.005Z

I never want to build an installer again. That was exhausting.

Wix might be the tool Microsoft use to build the installers for Office, but it's quite lacking in documentation. The tutorial i was working with covers most things, but helping me register a shell extension it does not. Without getting too technical, there are several ways of launching an external program to do the registering, i counted 3 by the end, and the first two didn't work at all. But no errors, just nothing when right-clicking a folder after the install. The error log was clean. No clues. Nightmare. A couple of days of trial and error and it's finally solved. Launching the external programs in a rather more obscure way than i'd first tried seemed to do the trick.

I'm an instant huge fan of VMWare. I'm on day 1 of the 30 day trial and i'm sold already. I have 2 images (Vista and XP) and its already saved my bacon. The version I was about to start giving to people worked on my development machine but put on the test machines of VMWare they did not work. It's taken a good few hours to find the problem which my developer machine has been masking and fix it.

Not quite ready to upload this version yet. Works on XP but i need to hard code an expiry date in before releasing it. I don't like the idea of a early beta version getting out and being used far into the future.

Never again will i under-estimate the work involved in deployment!

Site up

2009-03-02T07:21:00.002Z

Rough draft of the website is online! :)

See it at http://neveroverwrite.com/

Sorry nothing available to download at the moment, the beta should be there in the next week though. I've created an installer (msi) using Wix (which i rather like after a shaky start). I've yet to work out why the installer doesn't work on Vista though. Hence the screen shots on the main page are all of my Windows XP development PC which isn't ideal (too much on the context menu and XP just doesnt look slick and modern in comparison). But it will do for now...

Sharing makes everything easier

2009-02-18T21:38:00.006Z

I came across an interesting scenario this evening which forced a re-think on what folders should be being watched for changes, and when. In a multi-user set up, ie. a Windows system with more than one user account, should only the folders for the user who is currently logged-in be watched? At first it seems makes sense to do this. And hence I had a bit of a headache working out how I was going to stop monitoring certain folders when a user logged out, and monitoring others when the next user logged in. It's dawned on me though that the application should really be monitoring all users folders all the time. Its easy enough to imagine a folder being shared between members of a family for example. You wouldn't want changes made by another family member not being in the Change History of a file. This then simplifies the model of the Windows service that is running - it simply watches all folders it's told too, all the time. And whether the current user has access to a particular folder is neither here nor there. Excellent :)

Not got around to the video yet, been far to busy tinkering with CSS web templates for the website. Tinkering meaning trying to work out how they work. And I've been really pleased to learn they simplify the task of making websites hugely. Most of the annoyances I always had with Html where that the presentation and content where mixed together. If you made a decision to change the look of something down the line, it meant usually a ton of changes in the code. Very pleased to see times have moved on from those dark days.

The last 5%

2009-02-07T13:37:00.007Z

We had a bit of snow in my part of the UK yesterday. And a first for me, I couldn't even get the car out the car park, wheels spinning everywhere. And no one I know seems to own a shovel!

Instead I spend yesterday and today finishing the beta version of NeverOverwrite which is now done and looks quite nifty. Its funny how that last 5% of the features turns it from a whole lump of work into a actual useful tool in just a few hours.

The interface has changed a bit (and looks a lot better for it). I will upload some new pics of that soon. Actually, i may look into recording a video demo of it instead, I will see how much work is involved in that first.

Next I need to package it up into an installer for the people who have so far kindly offered to give it a thrashing (friends at the moment, get in touch if you want to be added! Free version 1 on offer).

Screenshots

2009-01-21T21:43:00.003Z

The beta version is now working with simple file types, here are some piccies...

Here I am right clicking on a folder and asking NeverOverwrite to monitor the files it contains.

Just a selection of text files in here. I open one and make several changes, saving after each change.

Now I realise i didn't want to loose some of the text I just deleted and saved over. I close Notepad and right click the file choosing 'Show Previous Versions'

The previous versions dialog appears showing me when each version was saved. I can double-click a file to see it as it was without affecting the original.

The emergence of a beta

2009-01-17T09:28:00.010Z

The summer was a lot busier than planned. It's surprising how long it takes to design and write code even for a simple 1.0 beta release when you have to do it in a few hours here and there. There can be days or weeks between opportunities and there's a "warm up" time before I'm really hitting the top of the curve again, which usually gets cut short soon after.

Things have been moving along with the app though albeit slowly, through a trickle of development since July. I have been hoping the idea doesn't get eclipsed by another product in this time and i don't end up regretting working more often on it. But last time I checked there wasn't much in the offering still.

I am pretty close to a beta now. I got a working version of the software running in December, and integrated into Windows, which was surprisingly difficult. Shell extensions are not my strong point.

I will get some screenshots up shortly. My next job is to make sure the files are always being saved behind the scenes from programs in the MS Office suite, these apps I'm finding do strange things when you click Save, and not always what you'd expect, the changes don't always go to the .doc or .xls file but sometimes to those temporary files you see dotted around sometimes. Tricky to solve this one.

I demand you to stop overwriting my files!

2008-07-19T14:35:00.024+01:00

Some time last year I was having a canteen coffee chat with a colleague. The night before I’d been editing a CV and deleted a paragraph, did some general re-wording, saved and closed Word. An hour or so later whilst re-reading it I suddenly wanted the paragraph back. Now normally when working on a document like this I’ll make a new copy of it before I start so I can always go back to the old version. This time I hadn’t. It was mildly annoying. Our chat came on to how common this must be and wouldn’t it be nice if this sort of thing was avoidable.

Over the years I’ve gotten into the habit of making a copy of the file, perhaps with “.old” on the end, so as I don’t loose the history of the file. But I’ve only done this for important things such as CV’s where I may need to get something back. There’s been plenty more files I don’t do this with, and been caught out.

“Make backups!”

Well okay yes I could (and do) now and then. But not often enough to catch those fine grained edits when I cut something out of a file, save over it and close the application. I’m not about to start running a backup every hour, or half hour. And even that might not help me. Besides, I know its the right thing to do, but who really has got a proper backup application installed and configured on all the PC’s they use?

In other applications I’ve gotten into the habit of copying large chunks of text into notepad rather than delete it. That’s just crazy... it's 2008 not 1995.

I recalled to my colleague my days at university and the old VAX machines we used daily and how they would never overwrite a file but rather save it as a new version of the file e.g. “mycv.doc;13”. All the versions where visible when viewing a folder. I mused that there must be SOMETHING out there that did this. And I went looking for it.

Needless to say there are some options. But very few. And they all have their drawbacks. There were a few shareware apps which were quite frustrating to use, and one commercial product (nameless for now) which did the job but in a rather over-elaborate fashion, using a custom application with which to browse the versions and manage or extract them. And it wasn’t as cheap as I’d hoped.

Some days after our chat I was still scouring the net in the odd minutes I had spare wondering “why is this feature not a part of Windows?”. I came across some exciting news, Vista appeared to support such a feature. (It means upgrading my PC’s but that will happen eventually anyway, and does this then mean my days of loosing mid-edit text in Word whilst working-on-a-CV-in-a-late-night-session are finally over?).

Well, no. As cool as the feature is, which is called Shadow Copy, or Previous Versions depending on where you read about it, it is still a time based backup system. It will back up as frequently as you tell it, and its a cleverly incremental backup (only uses space where changes are made) and it’s nicely integrated into Windows just the way I’d like it to be (right-click a file, “Show me the history” or similar). But even with way too-often backups set, such as every 10 minutes there’s still a chance of loosing data in-between this backup window. One final drawback, it only comes with Vista Business and Ultimate. Not Home Basic or Premium which seems to have become the most common version.

So full circle, that was many months ago. Soon after this I realised it was something useful enough for me to have a go a building. Being a Windows developer, the spotlight turned slowly in my direction. Nowhere to hide.

Since then in my spare time I have been designing and coding a solution which should do what I want in the way I want it, and be simple, and right there just where I need it on the context menus of my files and folders.

I can right click on a folder full of say Word documents and tell my computer to “Watch this folder for changes”. When I edit any file in this folder and save it, the old copy is not overwritten, it is kept. Of course when I open the folder I see only the most recent file, but if I right click and choose “Show me versions” it brings up a nice list of all the previous versions of the file right back to the original. It shows me the time and date it was saved, and the file size. I can double click on any file in the list and open it right there in Word (or whatever the associated app is). I can copy a chunk of text out of this and paste it into my newest version of the file.

Joy!

I’ll shortly be releasing a beta version of my utility, hopefully in August. It won’t have any bells and whistles but it will do the basic job well. If it sounds like something you would be interested in trying drop me a line.

I want to use this blog to gauge if this tool would be useful to others, and if so, how would they like to see it working. It may be completely different to the way I see it working, and far better!

This page should also be an good read for anyone interested in following the development of this small but useful product hopefully to market. I will be blogging the ongoing work at all the stages of development and I’m open to comments about the general direction of it.

So to start the status updates here we go... The application you will soon be able to download, is called NeverOverwrite. It is at present a service that runs invisibly in Windows after you install it and takes requests to monitor folders for changes. Each change is detected and the previous version of the file is saved in a repository on your hard disk. This works well so far (for me!) and the main work now is to integrate this functionality into Windows itself, so rather than a separate application, the tool works seamlessly with Windows. I will post some more updates as the development in this area progresses.

Feedback welcome! :)