VaultSync 1.8.9 — Keep your place. Work with clarity.

VaultSync 1.8.9 is a stability, safety, and everyday-polish release.

This release focuses on preserving UI context, tightening destructive CLI workflows, improving updater behavior across platforms, fixing compact-window layouts, and removing obsolete internal paths before the 1.9 development cycle.

Highlights

UI state and everyday use

• Preserve backup project expansion and loaded history depth across refreshes.
• Preserve surviving rows instead of rebuilding shared UI lists unnecessarily.
• Keep the selected backup project open while deletion refreshes its summary.
• Reflow dense Backups and Settings cards at compact widths.
• Prevent padded pages from creating horizontal overflow.
• Keep labeled navigation visible at the default window size.
• Improve muted-text contrast and status colors across light, dark, and custom themes.
• Center icon-and-label content inside shared status pills and backup tags.

Safer CLI restore and retention

• Restore snapshots from recorded backup data with confined cleanup.
• Reject empty backup paths before restore or retention cleanup.
• Confine CLI preset reads to user and bundled preset roots.
• Expand leading home-path ~ without changing literal tildes elsewhere.
• Keep backup preflight enumeration out of linked source trees.
• Make destructive prune dates exact and locale-independent.
• Preserve backed-up and protected snapshots during CLI pruning.
• Verify recorded backup bytes before CLI restore modifies the target.

Updater and platform reliability

• Prevent cancelled update checks from disposing or resetting newer checks.
• Keep VaultSync open while manual Linux update archives are installed.
• Make Linux updater-handoff qualification portable on Windows CI.
• Support the system rsync included with macOS.
• Include Microsoft Store uploads in verified release manifests and provenance.
• Keep Unix single-instance locks inside private VaultSync application data.
• Allow tray refreshes to recover after background data-shaping failures.

Maintenance and cleanup

• Remove abandoned metadata read copies without touching unrelated temporary data.
• Remove obsolete placeholder navigation and reflection paths.
• Stop rebuilding the obsolete hidden backup activity chart.
• Remove the unused untracked-destination scanner.
• Simplify backup-health refresh behavior.
• Consolidate repeated desktop labels and transient console-capture state.
• Refresh coordinated rendering, testing, and analysis dependencies.
• Clear additional static-analysis findings across startup, updater, power, logging, encryption, version handling, and notifications.

Updating

Existing installations should normally update through VaultSync's built-in updater.

1.8.9 includes verified platform patch assets for supported Windows, macOS, and Linux installations. Compatible installations can use the smaller patch path; when patching is not appropriate, VaultSync falls back to the full installer/update path.

A clean reinstall should not normally be necessary.

User data, the VaultSync database, project configuration, backup metadata, and settings are stored outside the application installation directory.

What's next

1.8.9 is intended to leave the current 1.8 line on a stronger foundation before development moves deeper into VaultSync 1.9 — Recovery Horizon.

The 1.9 cycle will focus on expanding recovery beyond project-level backups toward disk and machine-level recovery, including disk imaging, validation, bootable recovery media, and image-to-disk restore workflows.

That work will go through multiple beta releases before it is considered ready for stable use.

Full changes are available in CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to everyone testing VaultSync, reporting issues, and helping improve the project.