VaultSort 5.4.0

What's New

• VaultSort is now available as a stable release on Windows. Everything in this release, and everything from 5.3 — the Vault, Storage Analysis, Advanced Organize, duplicate finding, encryption with security keys and Windows Hello, secure delete and disk erase — is in the Windows build, signed and delivered through the same automatic updates as the Mac.
• Auto Organize: one-click sorting with recipes. Pick a recipe — by type, by date, screenshots and photos, archive old files, group downloads by where they came from, or the Smart recipe that reads what is inside your files — and VaultSort shows you the whole plan before it moves anything. Happy with a result? Keep it as a rule, or run a recipe on a schedule as a scheduled task. Sorting by recipe is free; the smart and by-source recipes are premium, with three free applies to try them, and undo is always free. Premium recipes are marked in the picker.
• Empty Folders. A new cleaning tool finds folders with nothing in them and moves them to the Trash, with undo. It leaves app data folders and drive roots alone.
• Undoing a run now removes the folders it created. Undo used to put your files back and leave the empty folders the run had made; it now cleans those up too.
• One place for everything that takes a while. Disk erases, free-space wipes, duplicate scans, secure deletes, encrypting and decrypting, Vault imports, exports and moves, and the AI model download are all tracked together in an Operations panel. Every one of them can be stopped where stopping is honest, including a free-space wipe (which gives the drive its space back) and a disk erase running with administrator rights.
• Quitting asks first. Closing VaultSort while something is running names what is running and asks whether to stop it.
• Progress where you already look. The Dock icon on macOS and the taskbar button on Windows show the progress of what is running, a notification tells you when a job finishes or fails, and your computer stays awake for the duration.
• An erase tells you what it will cover before you confirm. The confirmation names exactly what will be written over — a whole drive, one partition, or an APFS container, with every volume that goes with it.
• The Vault grows up. Preview images, text, PDFs and video right on the Vault page without exporting them — decrypted in memory only and dropped when the Vault locks. Move a Vault to another folder, including an external drive, with a way out of every state an interrupted move can leave.
• Better Vault notes. Notes are written on a paper-style editor with a formatting toolbar and Markdown guide, six colour tags, an outline for long notes, find and replace within a note (Ctrl+F on Windows, ⌘F on Mac), and search across every folder. Move notes between folders, drop a text file in to add it as an encrypted note, and expand notes to fill the page.
• Recovery codes can cover older encrypted files. Files encrypted before you had a recovery code can now be given one, so they are no longer stuck as hardware-key-only. (Files you encrypt from now on are covered automatically.)
• After a shred, VaultSort offers to clear free space — but only on drives where that would actually reach the old contents.
• Updates install themselves, if you want them to. Turn on automatic updates in Preferences › Updates and new versions download quietly and apply when you next quit. A button at the top right tells you when an update is available or ready.
• Settings categories moved to a list down the side, so none can be cut off the edge of the window.
• Shredding a folder is dramatically faster. A thousand-file folder used to spend about seven minutes re-checking the same drive for every file.

Bug Fixes

• Other programs can no longer ask the Mac privileged helper to erase a disk or securely delete files. The helper now only accepts requests from VaultSort itself.
• A disk erase could reach storage you did not choose. Drives with similar names, like disk4 and disk40, could be confused. The erase now covers exactly the scope you confirmed.
• Deleting a Vault folder no longer takes the notes inside it without warning, and moving a Vault no longer moves your own files that happened to sit in the same folder.
• A shredded document could leave part of itself behind. Shrinking a file before overwriting it handed blocks back to the drive with the original contents still in them. The full contents are now overwritten.
• VaultSort said free space had been cleared when it had not. On APFS the step was refused by macOS and the refusal was swallowed. You now see what actually happened, and the right shred method is chosen for your drive.
• Wiping free space on a USB stick or memory card now finishes. On FAT32 drives the wipe stopped after the first 4 GB with only "an error occurred". Failures now say what went wrong.
• A duplicate scan on Windows no longer downloads your cloud library. OneDrive Files On-Demand placeholders are skipped rather than opened.
• Wipe time estimates are honest. A wipe no longer claims six minutes left and then runs for hours.
• Large File Finder no longer says "securely deleted" when it did not delete, and other secure-delete failures now say why instead of "check the logs".
• Decrypting a mixed selection with a recovery code no longer quietly drops files, a failed decrypt no longer makes the next attempt blame your disk, and a late failure can no longer delete a file that had already been written.
• Key Sync no longer shows files as fine when your recovery code cannot open them, and settings no longer overstate what a recovery code protects.
• Touch ID and security-key prompts find the right browser and bring VaultSort back to the front when you approve, on both macOS and Windows, and the key window shows all of itself.
• Undo records folders correctly on Windows, so undoing an organize run removes the folders it made.
• Automatic updates no longer give up for six hours after one failed attempt at launch, and a failed update no longer leaves the progress bar stuck.
• File and drive names are shown literally, so a name that looks like HTML can no longer be drawn as markup.
• Assorted fixes: the Dock icon reopens the window after closing it, Organize results show their file counts again, macOS has its Disk Shred button back, choosing an unreachable network folder fails fast, and VaultSort no longer asks you to approve a helper you already approved.