6.x UI and options (the end?)

[bubbabobobbrain]

HI -

I've been a user of Eraser since it was developed and maintained by Sami Tolvanen, and it seems to me that since he passed responsibility away the application has fallen steadily behind the curve. There has been little advancement and no new feature or performance increase since I believe v5.6, and revisions to even resolve found bugs have become fewer and farther between. 5.6 was released.. roughly 3 years ago now? In the meantime the project has gone through a parade of developers.

Now that I have installed and tested version 6.06.1376, I see the current developers have changed the interface making it more gimmicky and Vista-esque, and dropping functionality and information. Previously I'd mentioned the lack of easily-obtainable status reports, now it seems to me that the ability to configure overwrite patterns and customize the number of overwrite passes has been removed as well, at the same time the application has added more gimmicks in the form of additional international flavours of overwriting standards. United States Department of Defense, Gutmann and 'DIY overwrite pattern' weren't good enough- so let's add Canadian, British, German and Russian military standards instead, none of which bring anything new to the table, but acronyms sure sound cool!

I've also had the application crash twice on Win2000 and 2k3 (x86) servers now, servers which have used version 5.x for several years without issue. This isn't the bleeding edge Windows environment nor is it 64-bit, yet in 3 days the application has proven more unreliable than the 5.x codebase.

I have to ask what exactly is the goal of Eraser's development now? Is it simply to increase the userbase by attracting those illiterates who doesn't understand or want the flexibility, or is it to provide a functional, reliable product that does the job of data destruction properly? The answers I see to questions in the forum do not encourage me anymore than looking at the new version itself, as they uniformly seem to fall on the side of whatever attracts more users. Changing how job status was reported with the answer 'users complained about an explorer window being occupied' to me sound ludicrous. Seriously? You change your application's behaviour because users don't know how to MINIMIZE ALL to make it relinquish foreground status?

As far as I'm concerned this product has reached a dead end, and after 6+ years I now need to go find something new.

 

[Joel]

the ability to configure overwrite patterns and customize the number of overwrite passes has been removed as well

It's still there, dig the Default Erasure Methods and PRNGs plugin to define them. Obviously, you are an advanced user and thus such a feature would appeal to advanced users and are hidden as such.

I've also had the application crash twice on Win2000 and 2k3 (x86) servers now, servers which have used version 5.x for several years without issue. This isn't the bleeding edge Windows environment nor is it 64-bit, yet in 3 days the application has proven more unreliable than the 5.x codebase.

Well, complaints about its stability will not serve to improve the situation if no information about the crash is given. Do bear in mind that the Eraser 5 codebase has undergone many years of development, for something rewritten from scratch to accomplish the first time around is no mean feat. While Eraser 6 uses Eraser 5 as the reference implementation, Eraser 6 naturally has to solve problems which did not exist during the development of Eraser 5 (and earlier) and in the process bugs will be introduced. A one-year public beta was released to gather information about the reliability and no such problems occurred. If no-one reports such problems and on all my computers Eraser 6 runs perfectly fine the problem will naturally not be fixed.

I have to ask what exactly is the goal of Eraser's development now? Is it simply to increase the userbase by attracting those illiterates who doesn't understand or want the flexibility, or is it to provide a functional, reliable product that does the job of data destruction properly?

Both. And both are equally important. To accommodate both user groups will involve redesigning and reengineering certain components -- developing new methods to solve old problems. If you are referring to the "dumbing" down of Eraser because you did not manage to find the UI to define custom erasure patterns, please reconsider your statement.