RFS: backup-manager -- Powerful and easy-to-use backup tool.

[Alexis Sukrieh <sukria@sukria.net>]

Hello mentors.

I would like to introduce the backup-manager[1] software to the Debian
community. It is a shell script, written with care and which is 100% debianized
(including the use of Debconf).

This backup tool can generate tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2 and zip archives,
upload them to remote hosts with scp or ftp and burn them to CDR/CDRW
media using mkisofs and cdrecord.

The main question to answer is : in what this tool differs from the
backup tools already provided by Debian ?

- The main goal of backup-manager is to be simple to use and simple to
  install. Using existing ftp or ssh account instead of implementing a
  server/agent structure for instance.

- It uses debconf for configuration and is really the easiest backup
  tool to run "out of the box" in my mind. Running dpkg-reconfigure will
  provide a full handler to the configuration.

- It uses gettext for internationalization and has already French and
  English translations (German and Spanish are on the way).

- Even though it's simple to use, it can do complex tasks such as burning a CDRW
  automatically, performing MD5 checksums and uploading files to remote hosts.

Here is an output of the english version of --help :

# backup-manager -h
/usr/bin/backup-manager [options]

Output:
--help|-h           : Print this short help message.
--verbose|-v        : Print what happends on STDOUT.
--no-warnings       : Disable warnings.

Single actions:
--upload|-u         : Just upload the files of the day.
--burn|-b           : Just burn the files of the day.
--md5check|-m       : Just test the md5 sums.
--purge|-p          : Just purge old archives.

Behaviour:
--conffile|-c file  : Choose an alternate config file.
--force|-f          : Force overwrite of existing archives.

Unwanted actions:
--no-upload         : Disable the upload process.
--no-burn           : Disable the burning process.
--no-purge          : Disable the purge process.


The last release can be grabbed from my repository :

deb http://www.sukria.net/debian ./
apt-get install backup-manager

If you are interested in sponsoring my package, feel free to contact me
either on the list or in private.

Regards,

Alexis.

Note: I have a good experience of the Debian packaging system as I've worked
on fixing bugs and ITPs (bugzilla, apache-lingerd or debconf).

1 : http://www.sukria.net/packages/backup-manager/

-- 
Alexis Sukrieh <sukria@sukria.net>
 
    * Another Linux Debian Geek Enthusiast
    * http://www.sukria.net
    * http://www.debian.org - Just for code.