VaultSort 5.0.0

What's New

• Choose whether you get stable or beta updates. Settings → Updates now has a Stable/Beta switch. If you move to Stable while running a prerelease, VaultSort tells you up front that you will stay on your current version until a stable release passes it, rather than moving you backwards.
• Duplicate Finder can move duplicates to the Trash. A new Deletion Method toggle keeps secure overwrite as the default but lets you choose the Trash instead, which is dramatically faster on large sets and external drives. Every confirmation and result message follows the method you picked.
• Secure Delete tells you what an overwrite cannot reach. Before you confirm, VaultSort now names what it found for that file — resource forks, extended-attribute payloads, hard links, APFS clones — instead of implying a clean result. It also distinguishes "checked and clean" from "not checked".
• Hazard checking now runs on multi-file selections, which previously went without it.
• Long disk operations report their result in a dialog that waits for you, instead of a toast that vanished while nobody was watching an hour-long shred.
• VaultSort says when it cannot tell what kind of drive you have. Where nothing can establish whether a drive is flash or magnetic, the confirmation says so before you commit to a multi-hour overwrite, and points at the drive-type override — which now lives on the drive's own card under Advanced Drive Information, rather than in a panel reachable only after selecting a file elsewhere.
• Free-space overwrite is offered based on the drive's medium rather than on whether it is the system disk, and when it is withheld the empty slot explains why instead of showing nothing.
• Error notifications stay until you dismiss them, and every notification now has a Copy button.
• Refreshing the storage device list shows that a rescan is running, instead of appearing to do nothing for several seconds.
• Space Saver reports a lost helper connection honestly — one warning saying some files may have been cleaned and it cannot tell, with a Try Again button — instead of marking every remaining path as failed.
• VaultSort is now available for Windows 10 and 11 as well as macOS, if you have a PC you would like to run it on.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a case where decrypting a VaultSort file whose .enc suffix had been removed could overwrite the encrypted file with its own output, and a case where an interrupted copy to another drive — an unplugged or full disk — could destroy the destination leaving no complete copy anywhere.
• Fixed choosing Decrypt on a file that was only mistaken for encrypted — a compressed disk image was the reported case — securely shredding the original. Disk-image detection no longer misfires, and the file is left untouched.
• Fixed VaultSort feeding a security-key-protected file to the password decrypt path, which could produce garbage and then securely delete your real encrypted original. Those files are now recognised and refused with a pointer to security-key decryption. (If you protect files with a hardware security key, this is worth updating for.)
• Fixed a genuine VaultSort file with no extension failing to decrypt in place; it is now staged so ciphertext and plaintext are never both at risk.
• Fixed encrypting a folder writing an unencrypted archive to disk first, and showing two progress phases that were no longer accurate.
• Fixed the completion message claiming your plaintext had been destroyed when deleting the original had actually failed. It now names the files that survived and explains what that means.
• Fixed a failed rollback during the encrypted-file auto-upgrade leaving an unverified replacement in place without saying so. It now reports both failures and where the backup is.
• Fixed secure-deleting a folder on an external volume aborting the whole job when it reached macOS-reserved metadata directories, even after wiping all of your actual content.
• Fixed flash and NVMe drives being given the spinning-disk strategy, which silently skipped the TRIM and APFS copy-on-write mitigations.
• Fixed resource forks being detected and warned about but never actually overwritten — only unlinked. They are now destroyed before the file is.
• Fixed secure-deleting a very large selection failing on a system argument-length limit.
• Fixed a drive whose type could not be determined being reported as a hard drive, which selected overwrite passes and implied a guarantee the device may not be able to give. It now reports Unknown.
• Fixed VaultSort taking the privileged path on a Mac where the background helper was not installed yet, and failing, instead of using the fallback that works.
• Fixed correcting a drive's type by hand not taking effect until you pressed Rescan.
• Fixed clicks inside the Erase Disk, Free Space Shred, Leftover Cleanup, Completion and Permissions dialogs reaching the card behind them, which could close the dialog mid-step.
• Fixed dialogs reopening at their previous scroll position, so a confirmation could start below the warning it exists to show.
• Fixed a failed erase or free-space shred printing the raw engine message at you. It now leads with an explanation and keeps the original underneath, and a cancelled authorization prompt is worded as an answer rather than a fault.
• Fixed storage figures still showing a drive's old occupancy after a shred or erase, including after a run that was stopped partway.
• Fixed cancelling a running free-space shred producing an error message so tall its Close and Copy buttons were pushed off screen.
• Fixed the leftover-data warning beside a drive's capacity being greyed out with an unreachable tooltip exactly while an operation was running.
• Fixed dragging a folder onto the empty Favorites panel flickering and doing nothing.
• Fixed a Scheduled Job continuing to show an input-folder failure after you had fixed it.
• Fixed iCloud Drive being treated as protected system state, which refused secure delete, organize, dedupe and rename on your own Desktop if you use Desktop & Documents sync.
• Fixed AI Job Builder failing on every prompt after Google retired the configured models. The fallback chain now recovers, a retired model stored in your settings is replaced with one that works, and an invalid API key gets its own message.
• Fixed a file watcher that lost its executable bit or failed to launch going silently inert while its status still read healthy. It now degrades visibly and can be restarted.
• Fixed the purchase link.