Bro’s reliability foundation, two-way Sync, and restorable backups
One combined entry for Bro’s August 1 development candidates, first public beta, and beta 2. The day’s work turns the original portable transfer utility into a checksum-verified Copy, Move safely, Sync, Verify & Repair, and Backup / Archive toolkit.
Copy, move, repair, and recovery
- Stage incomplete work under hidden names and reveal the final destination only after independent per-file SHA-256 verification.
- Detect a changing source, repair differences, verify again, and remove a move source only when it still matches the proven state.
- Keep two checksummed and explicitly flushed recovery-journal generations, reject competing Bro instances, and resume after pause, quit, restart, power loss, unmount, or temporary network failure.
- Record exact volume identity and wait for the same drive or NAS share instead of redirecting work to a familiar-looking path.
- Preflight space, write access, names, case and Unicode collisions, path limits, symbolic and hard links, sparse files, access controls, timestamps, and Mac metadata.
- Bundle a signed rsync 3.4.4 helper and its complete corresponding GPL source inside one portable, notarized Apple silicon app.
Non-destructive two-way Sync
- Create the same union in Folder A and Folder B by copying missing items both ways; never propagate a one-sided deletion.
- Skip identical items and ask whether to Keep Folder A, Keep Folder B, or Keep Both when same-path versions differ.
- Persist conflict decisions across restarts, preserve every replaced version in a recovery archive, and discard stale choices when either folder changes.
- Transport thousands of little files in resumable batches, then checksum-verify and atomically commit each item.
- Generate a durable report covering additions, updates, conflicts, Keep Both copies, skipped matches, safety replans, warnings, bytes, and recovery locations.
Backup / Archive and one-action restore
- Create an Apple Archive with LZFSE compression in a local folder before sending anything to the backup destination.
- Accept any volume size of at least 1 MB, create exact-size numbered
.brovolfiles, and record SHA-256 checksums for every volume and the combined stream. - Verify the complete local set, copy it resumably with rsync, read every destination volume back, and atomically reveal the final
.brobackupfolder. - Restore every volume in one action through hidden staging, verify every restored file against the original manifest, and fail closed before exposing a destination when a volume is missing or corrupt.
- Add local and NAS tests for exact volume sizing, thousands of little files, interruption and fresh-process resume, metadata, one-action restore, independent checksum comparison, and injected corruption.
Interface and records
- Keep Copy, Move safely, Sync, Backup / Archive, Verify & Repair, and the primary Start button equal in size on one left-aligned row.
- Reserve fixed-height description and option areas so switching modes never shifts the transfer history or the rest of the window.
- Add byte-accurate progress, transfer speed, ETA, current item, completed counts, receipts, Sync reports, archive details, notifications, presets, schedules, Finder Services, Quick Help, and privacy-safe diagnostics.
- Keep Bro free and portable, add a clear beta warning for mission-critical data, and make Check for Updates compare both version and build.
Roadmap
Direct cloud-provider support through rclone is planned, but is not part of this beta.