VaultSort 5.4.0-beta.45

What's New

• One place for everything that takes a while. Long jobs — disk erases, free-space wipes, duplicate scans, secure deletes, encrypting and decrypting, Vault imports, exports and moves, the AI model download — are now tracked together and shown in an Operations panel reachable from the title strip of any window. Start something, go to another part of the app, and it is still there with its progress. The progress bar minimizes into the panel rather than following you around, and results wait for you instead of interrupting: finish three things while you are elsewhere and you are shown them one at a time when you come back.
• Stop means stop. Every one of those jobs can now be stopped where stopping is honest, including the two that previously could not be: a free-space overwrite (which also gives the drive its space back as it goes) and a disk erase running with administrator rights — through the privileged helper on macOS, the elevated worker on Windows. Where a job cannot be stopped cleanly, VaultSort says so rather than offering a button that does nothing. If VaultSort loses contact with a helper mid-write, it tells you the work may still be running instead of reporting a tidy failure.
• Quitting asks first. Closing VaultSort while something is running names what is running and asks whether to stop it. Start something else while that question is on screen and it asks again rather than quietly stopping the new job too. Operations that were interrupted are remembered across a relaunch, so the next launch can tell you what did not finish.
• Progress where you already look. The Dock icon on macOS and the taskbar button on Windows carry the progress of whatever is running, a notification tells you when a job finishes or fails, and the machine is kept awake for the duration so a long wipe is not cut short by the screen locking. Quitting no longer fires notifications for the work it just stopped.
• An erase tells you what it will cover, before you confirm it. The confirmation now describes exactly what is about to be written over: a whole drive, a single partition, or an APFS container — naming every volume that will go with it, and how many partitions are involved. Choosing a volume that cannot be erased on its own offers the whole drive instead, and says what that would take. What you confirm is what is erased: if the drive changes between confirming and starting, the erase is refused rather than run against something else.
• An interrupted Vault move now has a way out of every state it can leave. If a move is cut short — the drive unplugged, the app quit, the machine restarted — Vault settings shows what was left behind and offers the choices that make sense for it: use the copy that is there, switch to a Vault you kept, stop waiting for a drive that is not coming back, or let go of a folder once VaultSort can prove nothing newer is in it. When a folder's drive seems to be connected under a different name, it says so rather than reporting the folder as missing.
• Notes get a formatting toolbar and a Markdown guide, a folder tree for choosing where to move things, and a New folder button beside the folders themselves. Expanded notes fill the page, and Tab stays inside the note you are writing.

Bug Fixes

• A wipe no longer claims it is nearly done for hours. A free-space overwrite on a large drive would say "about 6 minutes left" and then run for hours, because the estimate came straight from the engine's own guess. It is now measured from how fast bytes are actually being written, shows nothing at all until there is enough progress to be worth trusting, and resets rather than carrying a stale rate forward when a pass restarts.
• An erase could reach storage you did not choose. This is the serious one. When deciding which APFS container an erase covered, VaultSort matched drive names by text — so a container on disk4 could match one on disk40, and erasing the first could take the second with it. The container is now matched exactly, the volumes going with it are listed in the confirmation, and the drive is checked again immediately before anything is written. Related: a drive is unmounted and verified before its container is deleted, and if VaultSort refuses part way it says so plainly instead of reporting a failure.
• File names and error text are shown literally. A file or drive whose name contained something resembling HTML could have that name rendered as markup — bold text, a missing name, or worse — anywhere VaultSort reported on it. Names and error text are now escaped everywhere they are displayed, and invisible characters that can reorder or hide text are stripped from anything shown.
• Large File Finder no longer says "securely deleted" when it did not delete. A failed secure delete was reported as success, the file vanished from the list as though it were gone, and the count included it. Failures now say what failed and how many, the file stays listed, and a batch that ends early says which files were never started.
• A quit during an interrupted Vault move can no longer cost you the Vault. If VaultSort was stopped part way through undoing a move — killed, or quit at the wrong moment — the next launch could adopt a half-emptied copy and remove the original. The move's recovery was rebuilt around proof: it writes down what it has done before it does it, decides from that record rather than from guesswork, and only ever deletes a copy it can show is not the newest one. A Vault whose drive is missing is reported as missing rather than silently replaced, and an unlock waits for an interrupted move to be settled first.
• The security-key window shows all of itself. The window that appears while you approve with Touch ID or a security key was a fixed size, and had grown content it could not fit — so the VaultSort icon was sliced off the top and the buttons ran off the bottom, with no way to resize it. It now sizes itself to whatever the prompt contains.
• macOS has its Disk Shred button back, and the Files sidebar its drive-type diagnostics; both had gone missing from the tools they belong to.
• A finished Vault export is no longer reported as stopped, and a duplicate scan no longer freezes on its record or skips its cleanup when you close the window it started from.
• A paused model download reads as paused, not as an error.
• A stopped or partly failed duplicate delete says which it was. Deleting selected duplicates could report a stop as a success, guess a count the helper never gave, or lose the file name from its message; each of those now says what actually happened.