Tool Force Software Blog

The very long way to ForeverSave 1.0

Development of ForeverSave started after we noticed the interest in the free version (EverSave). Many users were asking us for the destination folder of the saved documents. But that’s simply not part of EverSave’s set of features since it automatically overwrites the files. The missing feature is called ‘Versioning’. So I went to the Apple documentations and found out that it is, in theory, a possible job to do. The first version of ForeverSave (which was at that point of time not called ForeverSave) wasn’t compatible with all apps I had in my applications folder. I spent many nights on finding a universal way and there were many times I was about to cancel everything. It was a real frustrating software project and I realized why there’s no app out there that does the exact same thing or sth. like that. Some earlier versions (0.1-0.5) had a totally different user interface with different tables, windows, buttons and even one version with a Cover Flow view.

I removed it one version later for both being private (undocumented class, reserved for Apple) and having memory leaks I wasn’t able to fix.

When reviewing ForeverSave now, lots of people may ask me: What’s the difference between it and Time Machine?
First off, I am working on a Mac Pro with a second hard disk (1 TB) which I wanted to use as a Time Machine backup. After some weeks I took a look at my backup disk which was almost completely full of TM backups. I noticed a few things during this time: First, my backup disk and startup disk were both very busy which makes work in e.g. Xcode half as fast, second Time Machine wasn’t always able to backup all my Xcode projects (file xyz is in use or sth. like that) and third Time Machine’s process is pretty inefficient since it only makes backups every hour and doesn’t recognize files that haven’t been changed.
I had a few application crashes (Photoshop, Keynote, Pages) and wasn’t able to restore my lost documents. During development, I often change or delete lines of code and then afterwards want to undelete them again which I wasn’t able to do. And think about the fact that Time Machine creates a several gigabytes large backup of your hard disk so you can restore a single source or photoshop file which is 80 kilobytes in size. I am pretty sure not everyone’s got a RAID of 5 or more hard disks to store backups on. Time Machine is great for backing up your hard disk in case of large data loss (hard disk failures) but not for document-based applications such as BBEdit, Photoshop, the iWork Suite or the Developer Tools. This is were ForeverSave comes in. I’ve used alpha versions of it during its development and restored several source files of its own project. A month ago or so I had a very large data loss in two source files, the Xcode project and my Interface Builder files.
By the way, I am storing all of my software projects on separate disk images (sparseimages). What has caused the crash was Time Machine not coming along with backing up images that are still open which was in this case the ForeverSave project. All currently open files were overwritten with unreadable characters from the internal memory of each application. Xcode says XML parsing failed while Interface Builder says ‘The file could not be opened’.
This is where I stopped Time Machine from creating any new backups.
I am using ForeverSave with Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop, BBedit, Interface Builder, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, TextEdit, Xcode and Mail (save only) and it works great. I can’t see any large performance limitations here (Mac Pro 2×2.66, Mac Mini 1.83).

First version:

Second version:

Third version:

And this isn’t everything. I don’t have all versions on disk, the first one had an own backup utility for restoring documents…

This is what ForeverSave looks like right now:

Remember, ForeverSave is NOT a Time Machine replacement and Time Machine is not a ForeverSave alternative.