We would like to share more details with our customers about yesterday’s service failure. The service disruption began at 4:47 PM EDT on October 21st when a portion of our web services layer was logically deleted. This layer is a core infrastructure component of the FolderGrid encryption grid and used to appropriately route and authorize incoming service requests. The layer was deleted by a maintenance process that was inadvertently run against a live web service instance. The ramifications of the errant command were immediately recognized and our technical team began work to repair the damage.

FolderGrid was designed from the ground up to prioritize reliability over availability and thus reacted to this infrastructure failure by forcing our service offline and ensuring that no customer data would be at risk as the infrastructure was repaired. Unfortunately the repairs required three hours and twenty five minutes during which FolderGrid was globally unavailable. At 8:02 PM EDT, the web service layer was fully repaired and service immediately restored.

Over the coming days we will be working to ensure this type of maintenance error can not recur to protect our customers from this sort of disruption in the future. This failure resulted in our longest service outage since FolderGrid became generally available over two years ago. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement to our service.

Sincerely,
The FolderGrid Team

We’ve just released an update to our Web App and API.

• It is no longer necessary to delete all the files in a folder before deleting the folder. The files and folder can subsequently be undeleted from the trash bin just as if they had been deleted individually.
• The Web App now supports recursive deletes for folders that contain subfolders
• The API will now authenticate a session token passed as a HTTP header

We’ve just posted a Knowledge Base article detailing the dates and times recorded and rendered for files secured by FolderGrid. As FolderGrid secures each new file, we record four independent times:

If you’re writing a client against our API you’ll find the details captured in our new article useful when parsing or submitting dates and times.

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new FolderGrid interface that will add FolderGrid as a mapped drive on Microsoft Windows. Windows users can now easily manipulate secured FolderGrid content as if it were local content. Our mapped drive support includes direct access through Microsoft Office and File Explorer.

The new mapped drive installer fully supports all Microsoft Windows versions capable of running .NET 4 or higher and both 32 bit and 64 bit systems.

By default, new folders in your FolderGrid do not inherit permissions from the parent folder. However there are use-cases where some users want new folders to inherit all of the permissions of the parent folder automatically. FolderGrid supports folder inheritance through a folder property named appropriately enough “Subfolders Inherit Permissions”.

To configure any folder so that its subfolders will inherit permissions, simply select the “Show Info” option from the right-click menu and check the “Subfolders Inherit Permissions” checkbox.

More than a few users have requested the ability to apply a permission change to a target folder and all of the subfolders underneath it in a single operation. We’re happy to announce that we’ve released an update to our web portal that will allow you to easily do exactly that.

The web portal permissions dialog now contains a checkbox entitled “Apply Recursively” that will apply any permissions modification to the target folder as well as all the subfolders underneath that folder recursively across the entire folder tree.

If you are using a modern browser with HTML5 drag-n-drop file upload support you can drag files directly from your desktop and drop them onto your FolderGrid web-portal’s File Listing area. The upload dialog will open automatically and add the file to the queue pending upload!