StepWind 1.0.2

StepWind 1.0.2

History now takes about a quarter of the disk it used to — at the same capture speed.

Storage was StepWind's biggest real-world cost, and most of it turned out to be avoidable. Measured on a realistic session (75 documents, 15 saves each, 210 MiB written): the store went from 51.7 MiB to 13.5 MiB.

Your existing history is untouched and still restores byte-for-byte. Nothing is migrated or re-encoded.

What was wrong

The chunk sizes were borrowed from restic — a tool that backs a machine up occasionally. StepWind does the opposite: the same documents, saved over and over. At a 1 MiB average with a 256 KiB minimum, every file smaller than 256 KiB was a single chunk, so each save re-stored the whole file. Measured: 21 saves of a 256 KiB document reused nothing at all, and one edited line added a complete second copy.

Compression was also set to Deflate's weakest level.

What changed

• Chunk sizes tuned for repeated saves (64 KiB average). A one-line edit now adds about a fifth as much; an 8 MiB document edited 20 times drops from 14.7 MiB to 3.9 MiB. Even a single capture of mixed data is ~9% smaller, because smaller chunks catch duplicate content that 1 MiB chunks straddled.
• Compression at Deflate's balanced level — close to half the size on document-like text. Capture speed is unaffected in practice: a chunk that already exists is never re-compressed, so the stronger setting is only paid on genuinely new bytes.

Compatibility

Neither change alters the on-disk format. A Deflate stream is self-describing, so the level is an encoder-side choice and old blobs decode unchanged; each version records its own chunk list, so re-chunking cannot affect anything already captured. This is pinned by a test that writes history with the old settings and reads it back with the new ones.

One honest caveat: for a while after updating, a file's new chunks won't match its pre-update ones, so both are kept until retention expires the older versions. Expect the store to shrink gradually rather than instantly.

300 unit tests, 0 build warnings.

Update

If automatic updates are on, StepWind will offer 1.0.2 itself — it downloads and verifies the installer, then asks you to confirm. Or download below and run it over your current install.

Install

Download StepWind-1.0.2-setup.exe (x64) or StepWind-1.0.2-arm64-setup.exe (Windows on ARM). Windows 10 (1809+) or 11.

"Windows protected your PC"? Expected for a new, unsigned installer — click More info → Run anyway. Verify first:

(Get-FileHash .\StepWind-1.0.2-setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256).Hash

Compare against SHA256SUMS.txt below. Full trust story: SECURITY.md. Enterprise: enterprise/README.md.

Website: https://stepwind.app