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Seems like the Gentoo folks packaged backup-manager, nice to see one more distro providing it.

A new development version of backup-manager has been published.

This release provides two new upload methods. The first one is called “ssh-gpg” and lets you upload your locally-built archives to untrusted remote places. During the upload (permormed with SSH), the archives are encrypted using GPG. The other one, called “s3″ is able to upload your archives to the Amazon S3 Storage service (if you have a valid account). This release also comes with a couple of bug fixes (filenames with spaces are now fully supported) and provides some other new options.

As requested on the users mailing-list, a Debian package will come very soon.

Update (2005/05/24)

The Debian package has been built and is available on my personal repository, it will be uploaded to the Debian archive soon.

During this weekend, as expected, I spent some time working on the backup-manager source tree. Bugzilla helped me a lot for doing this job, now that I use flags to mark my bugs, this is easier for me to figure out what I have to do.

Concerning technical details, I fixed 8 bugs in the SVN tree in the last three days. In those 8 bugs, three of them were feature requests:

1. The source tree provides now a new upload method for encrypting your precious archives before storing them remotely,
2. You can now change the permissions that will be affected to your archives if you use the secure repository mode.
3. You can choose to purge locally your archives immediately after having uploaded them, thanks to a new configuration variable that set the remote time to live (opposed to the local one).

Other bugs are real issues that are now closed: duplicates purging works again, the burning system can now burn a medium successfully in any circumstances and you can safely use FTP uploads in passive mode if you’re behind a firewall.

I think that we are really close to the next development release (0.7.3), stay tuned…

Thanks to the nice work of Jan Metzger, backup-manager-upload can now encrypt your archives on-the-fly during SSH uploads. That’s done with a new upload method called “ssh-gpg”.

The design is simple and effective: you specify a GPG public key to use for encryption and choose that new upload method instead of the “scp” one. Then, your archives remain unencrypted locally but are encrypted with the public key on the remote hosts.

That’s a great new feature for those who want to upload their archive to an untrusted place.

Next step: implementing the new phase in the main backup-manager process: the global encryption phase, see bug #82 for details.

As there are some bugs waiting for being fixed, a bug squashing party will take place this weekend. It will start on Friday (2006/04/21, 20:00 UTC) and will stop on monday (2006/04/24, 20:00 UTC).

During this timescale, every patch submited before the end of the party will be applied on tuesday, if the patch is granted. Moreover, the team will try to fix as many bugs as possible, enhancement items will be applied, if accepted too.

The goal of that event is to speed-up the release of backup-manager 0.7.3 and to prepare the next stable release: 0.8.
Any kind of help is welcome during this event, testers, documentation writers and developers, you are welcome. If you want to give a hand, come on irc.oftc.net, chanel #backup-manager during the weekend.
See you online, happy hacking.

Brad Dixon is working on a patch for backup-manager in order to support the Amazon S3 Web Service as a new upload method. His work is almost finished in the current SVN source tree and will be available in the next development release: 0.7.3. The Amazon Web Service Blog speaks about his work. Well done Brad and welcome aboard!

Andreas Gredler, who gave a talk at the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage” event about Backup Manager has just translated his slides in english and has published them.

They are also available in german.

Thank you andreas!

As you can see on this graph, my backup-manager system produces incremental backups and this leads to reduce CPU usage:

Master backups are made on monday as you can see.

Andreas “jimmy” Gredler - who contributed to the backup-manager source tree - will give a talk about Backup Manager at the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage” event.

The talk is entitled: “Backups einfach gemacht mit Backup Manager” and will cover the main design of the program.

It’s more than a year since the first development release of Backup Manager, this easy-to-use tool for archiving your data under Linux.

Version 0.6 which has just been released, provides a set of features for letting you implement your own backup strategy.
Backup Manager is able to use any existing infrastructure for achieving this goal: FTP or SSH accounts, CD/DVD burning devices…
A couple of different backup methods are available: tarballs (incremental or not), dumps (MySQL, SVN) and a generic method which uses content sent on stdout by an arbitrary command.

An effort has been given regarding localisation, the program is now translated in 5 languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese.

The user guide has been writen and is available in different formats.

Hopefully, the debian package will come very soon…