VaultSort 5.3.0

What's New

• The Vault: a private, always-encrypted space inside VaultSort. Everything you put in it is encrypted individually and stays that way on disk — there is no moment where the whole thing sits unlocked in a folder somewhere. Open it from Protect › Vault and unlock with whatever you already use: a security key, Touch ID or Windows Hello, a password, or your recovery code. Repeated wrong attempts are rate-limited with a visible countdown. Inside, you get folders and files with a breadcrumb, a size line per folder, and a Lock button; the Vault also locks itself after a period you choose. If the Vault's header has been tampered with, or replaced with an older copy of itself, it tells you what it found and makes you decide before opening.
• Getting things in and out. Drag files or a folder onto the unlocked page, or use Import. You choose Move — which securely deletes the originals afterwards, and reports exactly what the secure-delete engine could and could not guarantee — or Copy, which leaves them where they are. Export sends items back out to a folder you pick, as a copy or a move, and warns you first if the destination is inside a cloud-synced folder. Rename and Delete are there too, with secure delete offered on the way out. The rest of the app leaves a Vault alone: Advanced Organize, file operations, the cleaner, disk erase and scheduled jobs all refuse to touch anything inside one, locked or unlocked.
• Notes live in the Vault. Write in Markdown with a live preview toggle, and notes save themselves shortly after you stop typing. Search covers note titles and their contents, which means the text is decrypted only to answer your search and is never written anywhere in the clear. The editor can take over the page while keeping the folder's other notes beside it, so switching notes doesn't close the one you're in — and an unsaved edit is written on the way out. If the Vault locks while you're mid-sentence, it waits for your work to be saved before locking.
• The Vault is a premium feature, and the paywall only ever faces inward. Adding new things to the Vault requires a licence. Getting them out never does. Unlocking, browsing, reading, exporting, deleting and — most importantly — managing your unlock methods all keep working regardless of what the app currently believes about your licence. A licence check can read false for someone who genuinely owns one: offline at startup, a rate limit, a new machine, a reinstall before the key is re-entered. None of those should stand between you and your own files.
• The Explorer in Storage Analysis is now a zoomable map of your disk. Instead of one level of blocks and a list, you get the whole folder hierarchy drawn at once: folders are nested plateaus that lighten as they go deeper, files carry their category color, and the biggest things are the biggest shapes. Click a folder to fly into it, press Esc to come back up. An inspector on the right explains whatever is under your pointer — what it is, how much it holds, how recently it was touched — and suggests where to start cleaning, calling out caches and dependency folders that come back on their own, folders nobody has opened in years, and the single largest files. A filter box highlights matches anywhere in view, and right-click gives you Reveal, Move to Trash, Secure Delete, Find Duplicates and Organize on the spot. Press F for a focus mode that hands the map the whole window, roughly doubling the tiles it can label. The map fills in progressively while the scan is still running rather than making you wait for a blank screen; a whole home folder maps in about five seconds.
• Encrypt and Decrypt work on a mixed selection. Selecting encrypted and unencrypted files together used to disable both buttons and tell you to go split the selection by hand. Encrypt now encrypts the unencrypted items and leaves the encrypted ones where they are; Decrypt does the reverse. Anything VaultSort cannot confidently classify is left untouched rather than guessed at, the button says how many items it will actually run on, and the summary tells you what it skipped.

Bug Fixes

• Decrypting a duplicate gets your file back, under its own name, without touching the original. VaultSort deliberately strips a file manager's duplicate marker, so taxes.pdf.enc copy asks to become taxes.pdf — the exact name the original it was copied from still occupies. Delivery replaced that original without a word. It now refuses to deliver onto a file it did not create and puts the plaintext beside it instead. Duplicates also used to decrypt to a mouthful ending in .decrypted; both Finder's and Windows Explorer's spellings of the marker are now understood on every decrypt path, and a duplicate keeps its File Keys panel so you can still see which security keys open it. (A file of your own that genuinely has "copy" in its name is left alone.)
• A file named only .enc can no longer take a folder with it. Stripping the extension from such a name left nothing behind, and the delivery target resolved to the containing folder. The failure path then treated that folder as leftover output and securely deleted it.
• Decrypting in place no longer risks shredding the file it just produced. The cleanup afterwards compared two paths as text, so a path spelled with forward slashes never matched the same path with backslashes — most likely on Windows, where both spellings reach that code. The file that had just been restored could be securely deleted as though it were the leftover encrypted copy.
• Decrypting a folder reports where the folder actually went — and can pick up a newly added security key. The reported location was built from the encrypted file's name and came out as a path that never existed. The same wrong path was handed to the automatic re-encryption that adds a new key to old archives, so a folder encrypted before you registered a second key could never learn about that key. Both are fixed.
• Right-click Encrypt and Decrypt act on the file you actually clicked. The Finder and Explorer menu offered "Encrypt" on files that were already encrypted, and the app's own safety check could still be holding the verdict for whichever file you had selected a moment earlier — so an action could run against the wrong one. The check now waits for a real answer about the file in the request, and if it can't classify the file it says so once, instead of one error per file you click.
• Premium features are gated where they weren't. Deduplicate in Organize and Encrypt and Secure Delete in Protect could render without their upgrade gate. Separately, a premium user could see Undo offered with nothing to undo. Both corrected.
• Trial limits apply in the session you hit them. Running out of trial uses for a feature only took effect after restarting the app — a dozen secure deletes could go through in one sitting. The limit is now checked when you click, not when the screen loads.
• Two files staged in quick succession both stay staged. Clicking add on two rows in the file browser fast enough left only one of them selected.
• A beta is never offered on the stable channel. A prerelease had been set to publish to the stable update feed, which would have pushed a beta build to everyone on a stable release.