v0.4.6 — Autosync that gives up instead of hanging

Automatic sync runs at two moments you cannot avoid: the second you launch a game, and the
second you quit one. If the backup tool wedged at either of those moments, the plugin used
to wait it out for fifteen minutes — with your game frozen mid-launch for the whole of it.
This release puts a hard limit on that.

What changed for you

Nothing waits longer than three minutes. Every backup, restore, and save check now gives
up after three minutes and reports an ordinary failure. The old limit was fifteen minutes for
real operations and five for checks. Your saves are untouched by a give-up: the failure is
reported, the plugin releases its hold, and you can retry.

A wedged save command is stopped before your game continues. Previously the plugin could
let the game resume while an abandoned backup was still writing to your save files. It now
stops that work — and everything it spawned — and confirms it is gone before the game runs.

If it cannot confirm the stop, your game stays paused. This is deliberate, and it is the
one place where this release chooses a stuck launch over a fast one. A game writing to the
same files as a half-dead backup can destroy a save; a paused launch cannot. If you hit this,
the game will not start and you will need to reboot or force-quit it. It should be rare.

Overlapping work says so instead of vanishing. If a manual backup or restore is running
when you launch or quit a game, the two used to collide and the automatic one would quietly
skip. You now get UNABLE TO SYNC on the status strip, so you know your save was not
handled and can run it yourself.

Every save change at launch is protected by the pause. Restoring a newer backup was
already covered. Choosing "keep my local save" during a conflict prompt was not — that
decision now runs under the same pause your game is held by, so the game cannot start
reading saves while the answer is still being applied.

The status strip clears in three and a half minutes. It used to sit on screen for over
fifteen minutes after a stalled operation. Late failures still appear rather than being
swallowed.

The quick access menu opens faster. Its startup reads now happen together instead of one
after another, and it no longer keeps gathering information about the game you are on while
the menu is closed.

Measured on a Steam Deck

With three devices connected and a save already up to date, a launch was held for 3.5 seconds.
A launch that had to resolve a conflict and restore a backup was held for 17 seconds, and the
game started only after the restore finished. Quitting a game with changed saves took 19
seconds from exit to SYNCTHING COMPLETE. Nothing came close to the three-minute limit.

Worth knowing

• Syncthing's transfer-monitoring behavior is unchanged from v0.4.5.
• The three-minute limit has been proven by automated tests and by ordinary use on a Steam
  Deck. Deliberately wedging a backup on real hardware has not been tested, so the give-up
  path and the paused-launch fallback above are the least exercised parts of this release.
  If you want to try them, use a game whose save you can afford to lose.