Release Notes for the GM - Universal Sync application
- The 64-Bit version caused an error
Invalid Parameter when trying to delete file system files or folders.
The 32-Bit version was not affected and works well deleting file system files or folders.
- Shipped with latest version (1.1.1t) of OpenSSL libraries (released on 7. Feb 2023).
- Many bugfixes in the OpenSSL libraries see the OpenSSL change log.
- Build without dependencies to Microsoft visual C++ runtime libraries.
- Better parent windows for modal dialogs are chosen now.
- FreePascal instead of Delphi compiler used now to build the application.
- The application is now available in 32-Bit and 64-Bit.
- Everything is a bit faster now, the user interface and the synchronisation.
- Officially valid certificate used for signing the installer, uninstaller and application.
- Some improvements made to the integrated FTP and HTTP clients.
- Window animation setting dropped.
- Many internal changes and improvements.
- Shipped with latest version (1.1.1d) of OpenSSL libraries.
- Supporting TLS protocol version 1.3.
- Build without dependencies to Microsoft visual C++ runtime libraries.
- Some minor internal improvements.
- NTLM-v2 authentication scheme added to http implementation, which is used by the WebDAV data accessor of the GM - Universal Sync application.
- https support when checking for new versions.
- Shipped with latest version (1.1.1) of OpenSSL libraries.
- Supporting TLS protocol version 1.3.
- Some minor changes in the look of the user interface.
- New application icon.
- The default value for the time compare tolerance is 5 seconds instead of 2 seconds now. NOTE: Profiles that had a time compare tolerance of 2 seconds will have 5 seconds when used with version 2.0.30 or later. Of course you can change the time compare tolerance value if it doesn't fit your needs.
- String data types of internal API changed for better performance (synchronisation is a little bit faster now).
- Latest version 4.992 of FastMM (memory manager) used.
- Re-implementation of storage class used to store profiles and settings. The new implementation has less restrictions and is much faster.
- Files that don't exist at another location are not grayed anymore in the compare window.
- Executables are UPX compressed now.
- Some internal improvements.
- Shipped with latest version (1.1.0g) of OpenSSL libraries.
- Root certificates installed to the Windows operating system are used for SSL/TLS connections via OpenSSL now.
So there should be no warnings about missing local root certificates in the protocol anymore.
- OpenSSL API unit recoded for better source code quality.
- Some changes in the OpenSSL socket implementation matching the ongoing development of the OpenSSL libraries.
- Access violation fixed that occurred when a compare window was refreshed because changes were made to the include/exclude name mask.
- When the application was started with a profile id command line parameter for direct execution of that profile the user name and password were not decrypted before using them for login.
- Selecting entries in the compare window did not respect a scrolling offset resulting in wrong entries selected.
- Drag and Drop in the compare window did not respect a scrolling offset resulting in wrong entries dropped at wrong destinations.
- Multiselect behavior in the compare window improved, it was a bit different to what we are all used to.
- The status lines in the compare window were not refreshed in all cases of selection changes.
- Order of synchronisation profiles is always correctly remembered now at next application start.
- Order of locations is correctly remembered now, even if a synchronisation profile contains more than 10 locations.
- New settings added allowing to control how user names and passwords are encrypted when saving synchronisation profiles. When starting the GM - Universal Sync application directly on an USB stick a fixed encryption key or unencrypted storing of user names and passwords can be used now.
- The encryption of user names and passwords does not break anymore when a key derived from the windows user is used and mayor operating system updates by Microsoft are applied.
- The files
msvcr120.dll and capi.dll are included in the release now. Those two files are runtime libraries needed by the OpenSSL library, because it has been compiled with the Microsoft C++ compiler. In some situations OpenSSL caused problems when those files were not installed.
- WebDAV file size value conversion uses 64-Bit integer instead of 32-Bit integer now, avoiding errors with file sizes greater than 4 GB.
- Compare view sort order sorts digits inside the names as numbers now, like the windows explorer does.
- Shipped with latest version (1.1.0e) of OpenSSL libraries.
- Progress bar was not reset after transfers, so only the progress exceeding the previous transfer was shown.
- Tooltips for operation icons in the compare view added.
- Some internal improvements in the compare view window.
- Top level windows don't use CS_DROPSHADOW class style anymore (looks ugly on Windows 10).
- Some minor UI improvements.
- The internal usage of the synchronisation memory database has been simplified:
- Less code.
- Less memory consumption.
- Executing a little faster.
- Together with the changes in synchronisation memory use some details of the basic algorithm have been improved:
- Failed pending deletions will persist until next synchronisation execution now.
- If pending deletions exist for a read-only location, those elements will be excluded from the synchronisation
now. Postponing the deletion until the location is marked writable again.
This prevents elements that should be deleted to be transferred to other locations.
- Synchronizations state of elements already successfully transferred is not lost anymore in case of errors.
- In case of an incomplete transfer of an element to a remote location due to a broken connection a pending deletion for that element is scheduled now.
The pending deletion will be executed the next time the profile is synchronized.
After deleting the incomplete element on the remote location the next synchronisation will transfer it again.
Older versions of the software already tried to delete any incompletely transferred elements, but in case of a broken connection
this deletion fails too. Leaving an incomplete (corrupt) element with a newer time stamp on the remote system.
On the next synchronisation the incomplete (corrupt) element overwrote the original element because the incomplete
one had a newer time stamp. This doesn't happen anymore.
- synchronisation memory information for non existing locations is deleted from the database now when changes
to the profiles are saved, keeping the database small.
- WebDAV NTLM (http) authentication scheme was broken.
- WebDAV internal http header search improved.
- Order of Profiles was not remembered anymore.
- List focus was not changed after deletions.
- List was not repainted after operations.
- Groups in the profile list can be collapsed now.
- Groups can be renamed now, in fact re-assigning the new group name to all associated profiles.
- Complete selection state of the profile list is remembered now. Of course the new collapsed state of groups is remembered too.
- The thread evaluating folder attributes sometimes caused an access violation, fixed that.
- When assigning groups to profiles the scroll position of the list was not preserved instead it always jumped to the top.
- The http protocol of the WebDAV accessor did not respect the chunked transfer encoding in case of errors. This lead to
a delay (timeout) until the error message was shown
- Extending a selection in the compare view window behaved unusual in some situations.
- The UTC <-> local time calculations where always based on the daylight saving time of the moment when calculated instead
of using the daylight saving time at the time to be converted. This lead to incorrect comparison of modification times after
daylight saving time changes.
- The automatic detection of the best parent window for new windows/dialogs sometimes did not choose a proper parent.
- SSL/TLS transfers of ftp and WebDAV/http sometimes reported a clean connection shutdown even though the connection
was still intact.
- Some improvements made to the progress dialog.
- The folder browse dialog for the root path always reset the protocol to the default (ftps to ftp, https to http).
- Profiles can be grouped now, allowing to execute some operations for all profiles of the same group at once.
- synchronisation memory information is deleted from the database now after profiles have been deleted and
changes are saved.
- The database with the synchronisation memory is compacted now when changes to the profiles are saved.
- The Setup executable file is signed with a self signed certificate now.
- The Setup stores the size of the installation now so that it is shown by the windows software management UI.
- When canceling a synchronisation during a data transfer the partially transferred files were not deleted at the destination anymore (introduced in version 2.0.14).
- WebDAV: Improvement in the state machines of HTTP authentication handlers. Especially when using NTLM authentication.
- WebDAV: The client did not close the connection when the server requested so, this eventually lead to the error: "Steam read error, bytes to read 1, bytes that have been read 0.".
- WebDAV: If servers respond with a HTML error page, the text from that page is extracted and added to the error message now.
- Calling the application with a profile ID for direct execution did not work anymore. This was introduced in version 2.0.18. Since the schedules call the application this way they did not work either.
- With the newly introduced language setting the DataDir parameter was applied too late and did not work anymore.
- In the compare view no background thread searching for differences was started anymore when folders where manually expanded.
- The user interface language can be changed in the application settings now. Before it could only be set during installation of the software.
- Latest OpenSSL libraries (1.0.1h, release date 5.th june) included now.
- About 10% faster now.
- When a root path cannot be opened the error message always includes the path now.
- Some internal corrections in the compare window associated with the concurrency re-design done in v2.0.16.
- Newly created synchronisation profiles that have been synchronized but never stored appeared as empty profile entries at next application start.
- Internal thread architecture of the compare window redesigned making it more responsive and allowing more concurrency.
- Parsing of Internet DateTime values retrieved from WebDAV servers is more tolerant to other formats now.
- Duplicate SSL/TLS server certificate warnings are written only once to the protocol now.
- The synchronisation protocol was always saved to a file even when this was set off in the settings.
- Support for secure (SSL/TLS) connections added to the FTP data accessor. Use an URL starting with
ftps instead of ftp as root path for secure FTP connections.
- Internal caching of SSL/TLS sessions improved.
- Some improvements with the internal thread handling of the compare window.
- Internal session caching of the compare window improved speeding up background threads looking for differences inside the compare window.
- The drag cursor of the compare window does not cause any access violations anymore.
- Http authentication scheme NTLM added to the WebDAV data accessor. Especially useful when using Microsoft Internet Information Server for WebDAV hosting.
- Automatic following of http redirections added to the WebDAV accessor.
- Automatic TCP reconnect of the WebDAV accessor improved.
- Failed deletions executed due to a failed copy do not obliterate the original copy error anymore.
- Some minor internal improvements.
- Drives can now specified using their name or serial number instead of the drive letter.
This is especially useful to identify removable drives like USB drives.
- If a folder on a removable drive is selected with the folder browse dialog the dialog will
automatically return a path containing the drive name instead of the drive letter now.
- When the synchronisation was started from the compare window unsaved changes in the current profile were lost.
- The minimized progress window parameter for scheduled synchronizations of v2.0.11 will not
be remembered by this version. You must set it again.
- Errors when reading any folder contents during synchronisation was not cached by error handling
instead it terminated the synchronisation. Now such errors will be cached and the synchronisation will
continue if "continue on errors" is specified in the profile.
The reason not catching it before was to avoid a lot of consecutive errors if a folder cannot be accessed.
- Some minor internal improvements.
- User interface layouter much faster now and offering more features.
- Scheduled synchronizations can be started with minimized user interface now.
- USB copy buffer size calculation further improved.
- Internal dynamic buffer size adjustment changed again due to still poor performance on some USB sticks.
- Additional command line parameter /DataDir supported that allows
portable use of the GM - Universal Sync application.
- Deletions of synchronisation profiles and synchronisation memory during uninstall are done for all users
of the computer now.
- Option to delete the synchronisation schedules added to the uninstaller.
- When creating a new schedule the user account is checked before the logon dialog is closed now.
- When deleting synchronisation profiles during uninstall their corresponding mappings to the
synchronisation schedules are deleted also now, and the schedules are disabled.
- The buttons to move a profile up/down were sometimes enabled/disabled incorrectly.
- Autorepeat added to the up/down buttons when keeping the mouse pressed on them.
- Performance when writing to USB Sticks was poor in some situations due to dynamic internal buffer size
adjustment. The internal settings for dynamic buffer size calculations have been changed to
offer a good USB stick write performance now.
- Some internal improvements in the data accessor for mounted file systems.
- The hint areas in the folder browse dialog and the mask edit dialog can be set to be shown again
in the user interface settings now when closed once before.
- The time unit for the compare time tolerance can be changed now (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, ..).
- WebDAV: Problem with non-western character sets solved.
- When the analyse/synchronize operation was canceled the message written to the protocol contained
garbage characters instead of "Operation canceled".
- WebDAV: The content length field for the XML traffic was not correctly set preventing any proper operation.
This has been introduced in the first unicode version (v2.0).
- If an error occurred in the folder browsing dialog all following operations (expanding, renaming, etc.) in the dialog
showed the same error even if they were successful.
- Some internal improvements.
- SSL/TLS certificate warnings are now written to the log window.
- WebDAV: The last modification date was not set for server side entries anymore.
- WebDAV: A tiny bug prevented all WebDAV data operations from being properly executed. This has been
introduced by the v2.0 (the first unicode version).
- The folder browse button caused a "The root folder object is <nil>" error when the root path edit field was empty.
- License scheme dropped, the compare window is free now.
- The plus button in the folder browse tree did not disappear when expanding empty folders.
- Some internal improvements in the compare window.
- The folder browse dialog uses a separate thread now to make it more responsive.
- Help for license registration included now.
- The profile conversion to unicode only was executed for the user installing the software. Now it
is always executed when needed for all users.
- The messages of system exceptions contained only garbage characters.
- Version 2.0 introduced a problem with files in use again, which is fixed again now.
- The progress bar did not show any progress when executing drag and drop operations in the
compare window.
- The folder browse button caused a "file not found" error instead of default browsing the computer
when used with the accessor for mounted file systems and the root path edit field
contained a path that did not exist.
- Some minor internal corrections.
- The setup, the software and the plug-ins are unicode now. This means you can use
all worldwide characters (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, etc.) everywhere:
- in the folder names of the path where you install the software.
- in the Profile names.
- in the include and exclude name masks.
- in the file and folder names of the locations to be synchronized.
- etc.
- If you had a 1.x.x version installed before your synchronisation profiles will be automatically converted to
unicode during the setup of version 2.0.
- ATTENTION: Due to different encryption of unicode characters all user-names and passwords for FTP and
WebDAV locations become garbage and need to be re-entered once after upgrading to version 2.0.
- ATTENTION: Version 2.0 uses the same DB for its synchronisation memory but different places inside it. This means:
- Every synchronisation profile must be synchronized once using version 2.0 before deletions will be detected.
- You better remove the synchronisation memory DB when un-installing your old version 1.x.x. Otherwise it
will contain waisted space.
- When more than one synchronisation profile was selected the operation "Clear synchronisation memory" was only executed
for the first selected profile. Now it is executed for all selected profiles.
- Maximum length of include/exclude name masks increased from 4KB to 16KB.
- The internal storage format for the synchronisation profiles has been improved.
- Some internal improvements.
- The analyze mode did a full synchronisation instead of just an analysis.
This was introduced in v1.3.4. Now it does a pure analysis again.
- Some leading bytes where truncated when transferring files from FTP to WebDAV. This is fixed now.
- Automatic reconnect added when a SSL/TLS session had been timed out due to user inactivity.
- FTP command names included now in error messages.
- Internal caching of WebDAV connections improved. This makes WebDAV synchronizations faster in case many folders are involved.
- The folder browse button caused a "file not found" error instead of default browsing the computer
when used with the accessor for mounted
file systems and the root path edit field was empty. This was introduced in v1.3.3, but now its fine again.
- SSL/TLS support added for the WebDAV accessor. Just use an URL as root path that begins with https://.. and you will get
a secure connection.
- The compare view windows are automatically updated after synchronizations now if auto-updating
has been enabled in the settings.
- Synchronize button added to the compare view window.
- WebDAV: When the server response was transferred in http chunked mode the WebDAV accessor caused a
error saying some XML is wrong. This does not happen anymore.
- Synchronizing large directory trees with the data accessor for mounted file systems
is about 3 times faster now if only a few small files have changed.
- The data accessor for mounted file systems can handle path names with more than 250 characters now.
Still any single directory name inside the path must not exceed 250 characters, but the
length of the complete path may be up to 32767 characters now.
- New setting: Automatically show the protocol of the progress dialog if it is not visible and errors occurred.
- New settings page for compare window added.
- Folder differences in the compare window are analyzed and shown by a background thread now.
This can be turned off in the settings if unwanted.
- During the evaluation period a "Compare" button is shown instead of the "Analyze" button.
If no license key is entered the "Analyze" button will be shown again after the evaluation
period expired.
- The close condition "Only close when without errors" for the progress dialog didn't recognize
errors when "Continue Operation" was chosen as error action for the synchronisation profile.
Now all errors are recognized regardless of the error action.
- New settings dialog offering many more options to set:
- Close condition of progress dialog can be set for different situations.
- Window animation.
- Refresh of compare windows.
- Display of profile IDs.
- Automatic saving of synchronisation protocols.
- Help for command line syntax added.
- Some minor internal improvements.
- There was still a synchronisation state problem with files that could not be accessed due to exclusive
use on the source side. This is completely fixed now.
- New compare dialog showing the locations of a synchronisation profile side by side and allowing direct
operations on files and folders by drag & drop and context menu (PRO feature).
- The system Net-Logon dialog is shown now for LAN network locations that require authentication
instead of failing with an error.
- The wrap-lines button in the progress dialog did not work when it was set down the last time the dialog
was shown.
- License system introduced for PRO features.
- Many minor internal improvements.
- Some criteria for the include and exclude name masks did not work as expected, now they do.
- The semantics of the include and exclude name masks have been extended a little bit. They form
a mighty tool now. Please refer to the help installed with the software for more information.
- When synchronizing a file that could not be accessed because it was exclusively opened on the
source locations side and the operation was continued then this file was deleted on the next
synchronisation. This does not happen anymore.
- When files where replaced by old versions deletions where missed instead the files were copied again.
- The mask edit dialog did mess up the mask when closed with the OK button.
- Important: Version 1.2.6 did not detect deletions anymore. This is fixed in version 1.2.7.
Note: You will need to synchronize once with version 1.2.7 before deletions are detected again.
- Pressing the F1 key brings up the help topic for the control with the keyboard focus in all windows now.
If there is no help topic for that control a default help topic will be shown.
- If an error occurs during synchronisation the protocol is automatically shown now.
- If root folders cannot be found the folder path is included in the error message now.
- Leading and trailing spaces in name masks are considered part of the criteria now.
- Design of how to include and exclude folders using the respective name masks is completed and published now. Please refer to the help installed with the software for more information.
- Name masks can be edited in a separate dialog showing each mask part on a single line now. This is very helpful when working with long name masks.
- In some situations the application failed opening the help, this should be fixed now.
- The dialog informing about a new version stays in the foreground now.
- Last modification dates of folders are set the latest instead the oldest now.
- The root path itself is also added to the root path hint window now. Useful for long paths that will not show completely in the edit control.
- In the following situation files and folders could be deleted when they should not. This is fixed now:
- Create a profile with at least 3 locations.
- Synchronize that profile.
- Deactivate one of the locations.
- Delete a folder in one of the active locations.
- Synchronize the profile again.
- Recreate the folder that has been deleted before in one of the activated locations.
- Recreate some files and folders inside the deleted folder that have existed before.
- Activate the location that has been deactivated before.
- Synchronize the profile again.
- Now the files and folders inside the temporarily deleted folder that have existed before were
deleted instead of updating the reactivated location with the new versions.
- This is fixed now!
- Analyzing caused a "File not found" error when recursing into subfolders that did not exist at some of the locations being analyzed.
- Handling of problems when setting the last modification date of a file or folder improved.
- Analyze mode added that simulates a synchronisation to show what it would do but does not make any changes to the locations of the synchronisation profile.
- Some minor UI improvements affecting layouting, drawing and icons.
- synchronisation profile details were not cleared anymore when all profiles were deleted.
- Disabling "Recurse Subfolders" has never worked, now it does.
- Severe problem if errors occurred when setting the last modification date of files or folders fixed.
- The folder count in the progress did not count the root folder.
- When excluding whole directories all sub-directories are excluded now too.
- Default include mask to include everything is * instead of *.* now.
- Workaround for Win7 problem drawing ugly small system icons added.
- Drag and drop from the Windows© Explorer™ was not enabled for newly added locations.
- Auto re-connect added to the WebDAV data accessor.
- Some internal improvements to the HTTP processing in the WebDAV data accessor.
- For files larger than 4GB the progress was not correct.
- When using the data accessor for local file systems files and folders may now be dragged from the Windows© Explorer™ and dropped onto the root path edit control.
- Info dialog allows to check for a new version now.
- When a new folder was created in the folder browsing dialog it may caused some unnecessary data traffic.
- Data accessor for WebDAV added.
- when no protocol was specified in the dialog prompting for a server URL the folder was not
found in the browsing tree dialog. Now the folder will be found regardless if the URL contains a
protocol or not.
- FTP file transfers were executed in the default data transfer mode of the server. For most
FTP servers this will be ascii. But when transferring binary files in ascii mode they get corrupted.
Now the server is always set to binary mode before any file is transferred.
So no file gets corrupted anymore by FTP transfers.
- The order of the folders in the folder browse dialog is alphabetical now.
- When the first synchronisation profile was selected it cloud not be moved down after application
start unless some other profile had been selected before.
- Some internal improvements.
- In some situations the language of the plug-ins was different than the language of the application, this does not happen anymore.
- Some minor improvement with deletions pending due to a temporarily disabled location.
- The username and password of locations accessed via FTP may now left empty. The software will then prompt for the login data whenever it needs to connect to the server and a login is required.
- The dialog prompting for a FTP server expected a pure host name. If a complete URL was entered instead the connection failed. Now this dialog can handle both, pure host names and complete URL's.
- Since v1.1 pending deletions of locations that have been disabled for some synchronizations were not always detected correctly, instead the files were re-created again -> fixed now.
- Since v1.1 deletions of folders were not always correctly detected. -> fixed now.
- Some minor performance improvements when executing synchronizations.
- Storage of profile states inside the synchronisation state dataset were shared before, now they are isolated.
- Storage of profile states inside the synchronisation state database is freed now when profiles are deleted.
- The order of profiles can be changed now.
- The display of profile details is shortly delayed now instead of showing them immediately to allow faster focus movements in the profile list.
- Partially transferred data due to error or user abort was not deleted resulting in incomplete files staying at the receivers location.
- Data accessors that offer no backup semantics hide the backup checkboxes now instead of only disabling them.
- New application icon.
- synchronisation progress dialog closes automatically on success now when the synchronisation was started by a schedule.
- More contrastful UI appearance now.
- Some hint windows provide more helpful information now.
- Mousewheel does not stop scrolling the right side anymore when a control is moved beneath the mouse cursor.
- Mousewheel over a combobox does not send up/down messages to other controls causing strange UI behavior anymore.
- The browse for folder button is painted in disabled state on window 7 systems now.
- Painting of disabled button images is gray scale instead of embossed now.
- Content based calculation of hint window maximum show duration improved.
- The checkboxes for backup copies to the recycler were not always correctly activated/deactivated.
- No unnecessary UI refreshes when typing in the profile name edit.
- Some other minor improvements on the UI.
- Data accessor plug-in for FTP server added.
- Some internal improvements and corrections.
- Time compare tolerance setting moved from global settings to the profile values.
- Data accessor plug-ins that have no settings dialog are now shown in the list of the settings dialog.
- Some Icons replaced.
- Donation feature added.
- Check for newer Version added.
- Window position of settings dialog remembered now (like all other window positions).
- More information in the Help.
- The receivers eMail address in the problem reports was not correctly recognized by outlook.
- The evaluation whether a root folder has a recycler or is read-only may cause a delay.
This evaluation has been moved to a separate thread now to keep the user interface responsive.
- Handling of system, read-only and hidden files improved.
- Increased spacing in the folder browse tree on Vista and above.
- The icon of the progress dialog changes when the synchronisation has finished reflecting
the outcome of the operation.
- If errors or warnings occur during synchronisation their counts are shown in the progress dialog now.
- An unlimited number of locations can be synchronized.
- Includes languages English and German.
- Includes data accessor for mounted file systems.
- Integrated problem reporting.
- Integrated scheduling.
- synchronisation profiles and schedules can be combined n:m.