minus zero

I stopped working on pyBackPack a long time ago. The final year of my degree didn't leave a lot of spare time for hacking on the code, and it fell by the wayside.

Now, however, my good friend Andy Price has picked up the torch, and is going to continue pyBackPack's development. He's taken ownership of the code, and I've detached myself from it officially. Andy's created a project page, and the bug tracker and SVN systems are up and running. I've set up redirects on my website so all old links should be sent to the right places - please let me know if anything doesn't work any more.

Best of luck to Andy!

My holiday and the Google Summer of Code both ended on the 1st of September, and they were great fun.

I put together the final (as far as being accepted for my SoC submission) release of pyBackPack and it's the best yet.

Screenshots

Changes

• SSH Backups and restores
• When performing a backup, a progress indicator is shown.
• Increments on the restore page are listed most recent first.

Download

• .tar.gz: pybackpack-0.4.tar.gz
• SRPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.src.rpm
• RPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.noarch.rpm
• deb: pybackpack-0.4-all.deb

Update - The RPMs were re-rerolled with fixed dependencies, they should work OK now.

Bugs
If you come across any bugs or problems don't hesitate to get in touch, either by leaving a comment here, e-mailing me, or using the bug tracking system at http://sucs.org/~davea/trac

Thanks
I'd like to say a huge thanks to Elliot Lee (my mentor from Red Hat) for all his help, guidance and invaluable advice.
Also to Graham Cole (chckens) and Jeremy Katz for bug spotting, and pointing out some of my slightly weird interface design choices. :)
I almost forgot! My eternal gratitude goes to Jen for letting me take her laptop on holiday so I could work and for putting up with my hacking instead of relaxing by the pool. :D

Of course, it's not finished yet, and all you hundreds of faithful readers will be pleased to know that the future releases of pyBackPack will be documented right here. ;)

Here's the latest batch of updates, nothing too major - a more streamlined interface, better checks on overwriting files, etc.

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.3.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.3-1.src.rpm
RPM: again, still on holiday so no RPM. Sorry!

Let me know how you like it :)

Fresh from the shores of Lesvos, I bring you pyBackPack 0.2.999.

No screen shots this time (I don't think my wallet could handle the GPRS bill :)), but here's what's new:

• Editable backup sets
• Nicer interface for including and excluding files/folders in a backup set
• pyBackPack now uses nautilusburn to provide a much nicer way of writing CDs
• Single-click backup of your home directory to a CD from the main pyBackPack window

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.2.999.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.2.999-1.src.rpm
RPM: I forgot to install the right packages on the laptop before I left, so no RPM this time unless someone else is able to build one... :)

Bugs
I've run into a frustrating bug with rdiff-backup - namely that it doesn't like restoring from directories with a '.' character in their name. It throws an AssertionError. This bug seems intermittent, so any feedback you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Update - The problem disappeared when using pyBackPack on a different machine, so perhaps I screwed up rdiff-backup on the laptop. Ho hum.

I'm away (and fairly disconnected) until 1st September, although I will check e-mail every couple of days or so. Apologies in advance if I'm tardy in my replies.

pyBackPack development will continue apace, so there will probably be a few posts regarding that here.

See y'all soon!

The latest and greatest...

Screen shots

Changes

• User interface looks nicer and works a little more intuitively
• Can now restore from any increment, allowing the user to rollback to any point in time where a backup was made.
• Output logs now report something more meaningful
• CD backups/restores are now possible - This in particular needs lots of testing to see how it copes with different hardware combinations.
• It's now possible to do multiple backups/restores in the same instance of pybackpack.
• lots of other small improvements
• nb. Network (SSH) code is not yet active, should be done for 0.3

Download
tar.gz: pybackpack-0.2.tar.gz
RPM: pybackpack-0.2-1.i386.rpm
SRPM: pybackpack-0.2-1.src.rpm

As ever, if you've got any comments/questions/suggestions, don't hesitate to get in touch and let me know what you think about the tool. :)

pyBackPack is a user-level GUI tool to back up files.

It is written in Python, uses libglade and GTK+, and interfaces with rdiff-backup.

This is the first release so it's going to have at least 1 bug - your task is to help me find it. ;) I don't think it will chew up your home directory and trash everything, but if it does - sorry!

A few screen shots to whet your appetite:

Download: pybackpack-0.1.tar.gz

If you have any feedback/bug reports, you can either e-mail me or leave a comment here.

Enjoy :)

I just discovered a minor bug in pyBackPack (as it's now called):

• A user wants to backup her Firefox settings - so creates a backup set that just contains ~/.mozilla, and does a backup.
• Something screws up Firefox's settings, so the user restores her latest .mozilla backup to her home directory.
• The user then wonders where the hell the entire contents of her home directory have gone, and why only ~/.mozilla is left.

The Summer of Code is turning out to be pretty exciting stuff, and my project is progressing rather nicely. So far I've got a nice GUI written that can actually perform backups although there are a few major bugs that need fixing before I do a release (not to mention that being able to restore data might be nice ;)).

Integrating with rdiff-backup has been easier than I'd imagined, however its tendency to spew a fatal error and shutdown Python rather than raise an exception is frustrating.