UPDATE: Beta 3 is now available.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of a beta for the next update to iPartition. This beta version is available to all existing owners of iPartition. It can be downloaded here. If you’re not already logged in, you’ll be asked the username and password that you use for our site.

So what’s new?

As owners of iPartition will know, you cannot manipulate the disk that you have booted from which has meant that, to repartition your main start-up drive, you need to either boot from an external drive, or create a bootable DVD. To help with creating a bootable DVD, we have a feature in iPartition that allows you to create a bootable DVD, either from a template that you download from our site, or from the DVD installation media that came with your machine. Unfortunately, newer machines no longer come with DVD installation media and the latest downloadable template that we have (which is supplied by Apple), will not boot newer machines. We have asked Apple for updated templates but we don’t have them yet.

With Lion, Apple introduced Lion Recovery. This works by having a separate partition on your hard drive that includes a base system allowing you to reinstall Lion over the Internet. Internet Recovery is a related feature but is supported within the firmware of the machine (and therefore is only present on the latest machines).

In this version of iPartition, we’ve added support for creating a duplicate of your Lion recovery partition containing our applications. Obviously, to use this new feature you will need to be running Lion and you will need to have a recovery partition present (which should usually be the case, but we have heard of cases where the recovery partition is missing).

You will also need an external drive or USB flash drive to install the partition on (since the restriction of not being able to manipulate the disk you booted from still applies). The partition takes up a little over 650 MB (at time of writing), so you don’t need a very big drive. Cheap USB flash drives are readily available.

The duplicate recovery partition should operate in exactly the same way as your existing Lion Recovery partition (i.e. you can reinstall Lion and run other utilities) but you will also have the option of running iPartition. We’ll soon be adding support for iDefrag too.

If the external drive already has data on it, the data should be preserved (iPartition will shrink existing partitions to make room) so long as it uses the correct partition scheme (GUID). It will warn you if that’s not the case and you can, of course, use iPartition to change the partition scheme non-destructively.

After creating the recovery partition, you can boot from it by holding down the Option (⌥) key when you power on your machine.

We are particularly interested in hearing from customers who received their machines with Lion pre-installed. If that applies to you, please give this Beta version a try and let us know how you get on.

This version of iPartition also has a number of bug fixes and other minor improvements. Those of you who have reported issues with the current shipping version should find them all fixed with this release.

As always, please send feedback/queries to our support team.

Yesterday I released version 2.1.1 of iDefrag. Unfortunately, I’ve just discovered that there is a problem with the auto-update feature in version 2.1.0 which means you cannot update automatically. It is intermittent and it can sometimes succeed on faster machines which is why we did not notice it initially.

The bug was introduced in version 2.1.0 when support for quick termination was added. Quick termination means that when you quit an application it will quit much more quickly (but only when the application isn’t doing something). Regrettably, it broke our auto-update feature.

If you want to update to version 2.1.1, you can download the update directly from our website. If version 2.1.0 is working well for you, there is no need to upgrade to version 2.1.1 since the changes are relatively minor (see release notes).

Sadly, when we release version 2.1.2, the same problem will exist and upgrading to that version will also have to be done manually (if you’re running version 2.1.0 and 2.1.1).

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused our customers.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.2.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition 3 itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems, please contact our support team.

We’re very pleased to announce the release of VMOptimizer, a new product that optimizes VMware virtual disk images.

For more information, please see our product page and give the demonstration version a try.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.1.

This update contains a few bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed.

Please contact our support ream if you have any problems with this new version.

We’ve got a new version of iPartition coming out soon and here’s a Beta version for you to try. Download it here (9 MB). (You might be prompted for the username and password that you use on our site.)

We’ve added basic cloning support: simply drag a partition to a disk, or to the free space on your current disk and it should queue an operation (or you can use the menu). The actual cloning operation should be pretty much as fast as the disks allow. Note that whilst it will clone Windows partitions happily, you’ll have to do a bit of work if you want to boot from them.

Anybody that reports a bug in the beta version, that we don’t know about, will get a free license for iDefrag¹.

Please send comments about this beta to our support team.

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iDefrag version 2.0.2.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

We’re planning to release iDefrag 2.0.2 very soon. If you’d like to try the latest beta, you can get it here (15 MB) (you might be prompted for the username and password that you use on our site). There are no outstanding issues so we expect the beta to be pretty much what we’ll release.

We’ve fixed a number of things including a few issues with the restart feature. We’ll do full release notes for the release.

Anybody that reports a bug in the beta version, that we don’t know about, will get a free license for iPartition¹.

Please send comments about this beta to our support team.

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

We’re pleased to announce the release of the first update for iDefrag 2, version 2.0.1.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

(If you have upgraded to iDefrag 2 from a previous version and were following the iDefrag Atom feed, note that the URL for the iDefrag 2 feed is different; you may wish to point your feed reader at the iDefrag 2 feed instead.)

It’s been a while coming, but we’re pleased to announce that we have today released iDefrag 2.

If you’ve recently purchased iDefrag 1.x from us, you may already have a complementary license for iDefrag 2 (check the My Account page); otherwise, existing customers can upgrade at a reduced rate.

The major new features are:

• You can now run the offline algorithms without needing to create a boot disk; iDefrag can now reboot into a special mode where it has exclusive access to the disk.

• We’ve added the ability to defragment a single file.

• The online algorithm will now reliably skip files that are in use (regardless of whether or not they are using file locking).

• The Statistics pane will give you information about compressed files on Snow Leopard. (iDefrag always preserves compression.)

• The Inspector now shows more information about files.

• Creating a boot disk with iDefrag can be done via a menu option within iDefrag and should be simpler than using CDMaker.

• It is now a 64 bit application.

• The Optimize algorithm can now deal with volumes that have very little, or heavily fragmented, free space (and the “skip files…due to lack of free space” preference has been removed).

• New and improved look.

There are also numerous other great improvements that haven’t been mentioned.

If you’d like to try out the demonstration version, please download it (limited to very small disk images).

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.