FTPie 2026.9.1: Ten Themes, an Activity Log, and Two Bugs That Could Lose Files

Three releases have shipped since the object storage post in July - 2026.8.1, 2026.8.2 and now 2026.9.1. Rather than three announcements, here is one. The headline is that FTPie has ten themes instead of two. The more important part, further down, is that two bugs which could quietly lose files are gone. In between: a proper activity log, backups you can stop and actually trust, and capture tools that grew up.

Ten themes, and one place to pick them

FTPie had Dark and Light. It now has ten - five of each. Every theme carries a single accent colour used consistently for selection and controls, which is the quickest way to tell them apart, so each shot below is the same folder with the same file selected. Click any of them to see it full size.

Five dark themes

Dark the original, rebuilt Nocturne cool blue-black Ember warm, coffee-toned Obsidian near-black, high contrast Pine deep forest green-black

Five light themes

Light the original, rebuilt Mist cool grey-blue Parchment warm paper Daylight bright and plain Sage soft green

Dark and Light were rebuilt, not just added to. Both had drifted over the years: surfaces that were meant to be distinct steps had collapsed onto nearly the same colour, so panels, rows and selection states blended into each other. Every theme now moves in even steps from background to foreground, and the two originals got the same treatment as the eight new ones - so if you never change a thing, FTPie still looks better than it did last month.

One picker, in Settings. There used to be two different theme controls in two places that did not agree with each other. Now there is a single swatch list, grouped by family, and the quick dark/light flip in the window chrome stays for when that is all you want.

Themes can switch themselves between day and night. Pick one for daytime and one for the evening, set the hours, and FTPie remembers your choice within each family - so a Parchment user is not dumped back into plain Light every morning.

Dark and Light are in the free plan. The eight new themes are part of FTPie Pro, which every install can try for 30 days.

Two ways files could be lost - both fixed

This is the part of the release we would rather not have had to write, and the part most worth reading. Two paths in 2026.9.1 and earlier could destroy data without asking:

• Dragging a folder from your PC onto a cloud storage deleted the local original. The drop was treated as a move rather than a copy, so the files were uploaded and then removed from your PC - nothing asked, nothing to undo. A cross-storage drag now copies.
• A Move between storages could delete the source after failing to copy it. If a folder could not be created at the destination, its contents were never transferred - but the source was still removed afterwards. FTPie now refuses to delete anything that did not fully arrive.

Both are fixed in 2026.9.1. If you are on an older build, this alone is the reason to update.

One page that says what happened while you were away

FTPie runs backups and scheduled transfers in the background, and until August it was oddly bad at telling you about them. A run that failed overnight left a toast nobody saw and a log that lived only in memory - so by morning there was nothing to look at.

2026.8.1 replaced all of that with one Activity page. Everything the app did - backups, scheduled transfers and folder notifications - newest first, in one list, with filters for the job, the severity and the time range. It is written to its own database, so it survives a restart, and it is trimmed automatically after 30 days. When a job fails, clicking the warning opens the log narrowed to that exact run, with the full error a click away.

Fewer interruptions came with it: only genuine failures raise a notification now. Successful runs are recorded quietly instead of popping up.

Backups: health at a glance, a Stop button, and encryption you can find

Every backup and scheduled transfer now shows a coloured dot next to its name - green when the last run succeeded, amber when something went wrong recently, red when the last run failed, grey when paused, an empty ring when it has never run. Hover it and you get a small bar with one mark per recent run, so "this has been solid for a week" is instantly distinguishable from "this fails every other night". Hover a mark for that run's details; click it to open the activity log for it.

That history used to be thrown away by your retention setting - cleaning up old snapshots erased the record that those runs had ever happened, and because it only cleaned up successful runs, the failures piled up and your history looked far worse than reality. Snapshots are still reclaimed exactly as before; the record now stays.

2026.8.2 added a Stop button. While a job runs, its Run now becomes Stop. Until then the only ways out of a long backup were waiting it out or closing FTPie. A stopped run is recorded as Interrupted rather than counted as a success, and its partial snapshot keeps its unfinished marker.

Backup encryption is now its own step in the wizard - one checkbox, one password, ahead of compression. It used to sit four levels deep: enable compression, open Advanced, tick password protection, then change the algorithm off its default. Backups are always AES-256 now, the algorithm dropdown is gone along with the legacy ZIP encryption it defaulted to, encrypting no longer forces compression, and your backup password is protected by Windows and tied to your Windows account instead of sitting in plain text in a local database.

Screenshots and screen recording grew up

FTPie's screenshot and screen recording tools got the round of work they needed to stop being a nice extra and start being usable all day:

• Instant hotkeys for region, window and full screen that capture straight away without opening the tool first - which is what finally makes it possible to capture menus and popups, since those used to close the moment the tool appeared.
• Screenshots are copied to the clipboard automatically, and a new After capture choice decides whether to open the editor, just save the file, or share it. There is an optional 3, 5 or 10 second delay for menus you have to hold open.
• Stop and pause hotkeys for recordings, so you can end one without bringing the recorder back on screen and into the shot, plus a 3-2-1 countdown to get to the right window.
• Keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus on both pages - Ctrl+C, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Shift+S, undo and redo. The recording page previously had no keyboard handling at all.
• Region recording on scaled displays is fixed. At 120% the selection border and the recorded video were both offset and about 17% too small.

Smaller, signed, and less likely to be flagged

Every file in FTPie is now digitally signed. Previously only the main executables carried the signature and the application's libraries did not, which is a common cause of antivirus and SmartScreen false positives - including the "file blocked on first launch" problem. The download and install also got about 22 MB smaller, by removing duplicated components and debug symbol files that had been shipping by mistake, and installing over an existing copy no longer pauses for a minute before it starts.

Housekeeping worth a line each

• FTPie stops growing while you use it. Every tab you closed leaked about 3 MB - closed tabs were never released, and each left a timer running. Three separate causes, all fixed; memory is now flat over repeated open-and-close cycles.
• Around 1,900 new or corrected translations across all 20 translated languages, closing most of the English that used to survive a language switch. The built-in PDF viewer was English in every language and is now translated, and text that only updated on restart - the Activity filters, the Screenshot settings, the "Local PC" storage name - now changes the moment you switch.
• Your trial has its own countdown in the window chrome, and gets gently more prominent as it runs down rather than shouting from day one. A paid licence shows nothing at all. New installs simply get the trial instead of being asked to choose before they have seen FTPie do anything - and if 30 days were not enough, you can request a 14-day extension from the licence screen, once per installation.
• A copied file can be pasted more than once. The first paste used to clear the clipboard.
• "Skip files that haven't changed" has been removed from scheduled transfers. It could never skip anything - the check it relied on compared each file against nothing, so every run transferred everything regardless of the setting. Rather than leave a switch that did not work, it is gone until it can be done properly. Your transfers behave exactly as they did; only the misleading option is gone.

What's next: the MCP server

The next feature is the one we have been quietest about. FTPie's MCP server is partially built and in testing now, and should ship within a few weeks.

The short version: MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that lets an AI assistant use external tools. There are already MCP servers for Google Drive and for Dropbox - one per provider, each needing its own setup and its own authorisation. FTPie is a file manager that already speaks to all of them, so exposing one server that reaches every storage you have connected - clouds, S3, SFTP, WebDAV, your NAS - is a small step from where the app already stands, and a much better deal than running six.

Two things we care about in the design. Your credentials never leave FTPie - the assistant only ever gets opaque references to files, never passwords or OAuth tokens. And there is a real window behind it: transfers it starts appear in FTPie's normal queue with progress and a cancel button, and files it opens are shown in FTPie's own viewer, so you can see what it did rather than take its word for it. We have shipped this pattern once already, in Snoq, so the plumbing is not new to us.

The feature page has the full plan. If a particular client or workflow matters to you, tell us - it genuinely shapes what lands first.

Get it

FTPie updates itself, so you may already be on 2026.9.1 - check Settings → About. If not, download it here; it installs over your existing copy and keeps your storages and settings. The full, unabridged lists are in the release notes for 2026.8.1, 2026.8.2 and 2026.9.1.