Fileson 2.1 shipped today. This release focuses on three areas that our Pro and Enterprise customers have been asking about for months: better audit trails, more control over shared links, and a faster sync engine.
Audit logs
Every file action in your organisation is now recorded in a searchable log. Uploads, downloads, shares, permission changes, deletions, and login events all appear in a single timeline. Each entry includes the acting user, timestamp, IP address, and affected resource.
The request for this feature came overwhelmingly from compliance teams. Several of our customers in financial services and healthcare needed to demonstrate, during audits, exactly who accessed which files and when. Before 2.1, they cobbled this together from access logs and permission snapshots. Now it is a single page in the admin dashboard.
Audit logs are available on Pro and Enterprise plans. Retention is 90 days on Pro and unlimited on Enterprise. Logs can be exported as CSV for integration with your SIEM or archival system.
Link expiry and download limits
Shared links can now carry an expiration date and a maximum download count. Set a link to expire in 24 hours, or after five downloads, or both. Once the limit is reached, the link returns a 404.
We also added optional password protection for links. The password is hashed client-side and used to derive a secondary encryption key, so even the link URL alone is not sufficient to access the file.
These controls existed in various feature request threads going back to early 2023. The delay was partly architectural: adding constraints to shared links while maintaining zero-knowledge encryption required rethinking how link tokens are generated and validated. We wrote about the technical approach in an internal document that we plan to publish as a follow-up post.
Sync engine rewrite
The desktop sync client now uses a new diff algorithm that reduces the data transferred during incremental syncs by roughly 60%. For a user with 10,000 files and typical daily modifications, a sync that previously took 45 seconds now completes in about 15.
The old engine computed file hashes sequentially on a single thread. The new engine parallelises hashing across available cores and uses a Merkle tree structure to quickly identify which branches of the file tree have changed. The improvement is most dramatic on machines with fast SSDs and multiple cores, which describes most laptops sold in the past three years.
We also fixed a long-standing bug where the sync client would occasionally re-upload unchanged files after a system crash. The new engine writes a durable checkpoint after each completed sync batch, so recovery after an interruption resumes from the last known-good state.
Upgrading
The web app already reflects the 2.1 changes. Desktop clients will auto-update over the next 48 hours, or you can trigger the update manually from Settings > About. The API version has not changed; existing integrations will continue to work without modification.
If you run into anything unexpected, reach out to support@fileson.cloud.