Free backed up software for linux

Backup project adds instant version control to any file on a Unix system.

Do you hate *.bak and *.20050101 and *.cjn (your initials here) and *.do.not.touch files as much as I do? They litter your filesystem any time someone (and were all guilty of it) needs to back-up a file theyre working on.

But who ever comes back and cleans the mess up? At what point is an old backed-up file no longer needed? And what about when you need that backup file only to discover that its missing, or you didnt capture one because you didnt want to add clutter? Backup is my answer to all that. It adds instantly available, reliable version control to every file in the filesystem.

Backup is a lightweight interface to the Subversion svn_fs library. It uses the powerful version control software as a backend to a simple and minimalistic (though effective) user interface. It is designed for use on Linux/Unix (including OS X) systems as a method of archiving configuration files that change semi-frequently, but do not necessarily warrent their own version control mechanism or repository. Things like "/etc/hosts" or "httpd.conf".

It can create a backup of any file without having to import it first, without worrying about setting up new repositories, and (because it speaks directly to the FS layer) without littering hidden ".svn" (or even worse, visable "CVS") directories all over the place. It does this by using a single global "archive," which contains a filesystem that mirrors your root as you add to it. You can view the archive and restore files, do diffs, and move things around as necessary. For more complex administration, the archive is a standard Subversion file system which can be administrated with any compatable client (including the svn command line tools).

The current version is knocked together in Perl. Its alpha, but it is pretty functional... at least for a proof of concept. Eventually I plan to re-write it in C... but we all know about "the best laid plans." In the mean while, the Perl version does work... mostly. The only real trick is that you need to compile and install the Subversion bindings for it Perl. There are some other modules you may need as well, but theyre all fairly standard.

Usage:

You probably shouldnt if you youre doing mission-critical work. Its still alpha code after-all. But if you do decide to give it a spin, dont blame me for any breakage (the only thing that should damage existing files is the combination of -r and -o, which will overwrite during a restore).

Box Backup is an FREE, completely automatic on-line backup system for UNIX.
Main features:
- All backed up data is stored on the server in files on a filesystem; no tape or archive devices are used
- The server is trusted only to make files available when they are required; all data is encrypted
- A backup daemon runs on systems to be backed up, and copies encrypted data to the server when it notices changes
- Only changes within files are sent to the server, just like rsync
- Old versions of files on the server are stored as changes from the current version
- Behaves like tape -- old versions and deleted files are available
- Choice of backup behaviour, optimised for document or server backup
- Designed to be easy and cheap to run a server. Portable implementation, and RAID implemented in userland for reliability without complex server setup or expensive hardware. (optional)
Enhancements:
- The diffing algorithm was highly optimised for speed.
- Bugs were fixed. Solaris support was added.
- Portability improvements were made, including a new autoconf based build.
- Xattrs are supported on Linux and Darwin, which backs up resource forks under Mac OS X.
- Experimental features include keep-alive on long diffing operations, saving state for non-server use, a native Win32 port, and support for MinGW and MSVC under Win32.

mylvmbackup project is a Perl script for quickly creating backups of MySQL servers data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.
The LVM snapshot is mounted to a temporary directory and all data is backed up using the tar program. The archive file is created using a name of the form backup-YYYYMMDD_hhmmss_mysql.tar.gz, where YYYY, MM, DD, hh, mm, and ss represent the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of the time at which the backup occurred. The prefix backup and the date format can be modified. The use of timestamped archive names allows you to run mylvmbackup many times without danger of rewriting old archives.
It is necessary to run mylvmbackup on the same host where the MySQL server runs. If your MySQL daemon is not listening on localhost, or using the default socket location, you must specify --host or --socket. Even though mylvmbackup communicates with the server through a normal client connection to obtain the read lock and flush data, it makes the backup by accessing the file system directly. It is also necessary that the MySQL server data directory resides on an LVM volume. (It is, however, a good idea to do the LVM backup to a different partition than the one where the data directory resides. Otherwise, there is a good chance that LVM will run out of undo space for LVM snapshot maintenance and the backup will fail.)
The user who invokes mylvmbackup must have sufficient filesystem permissions to create the LVM snapshot and mount it. This includes read/write access to the backup directory.
For proper operation mylvmbackup requires that Perl as well as the DBI and DBD::mysql modules. In addition, it uses several other programs: /bin/date to construct the archive filename, tar to back up data, LVM utilities to create and remove the LVM snapshot, and the system utilities mount and umount.
Enhancements:
- The "--innodb-recover" option was added, which provides an option to run InnoDB recovery on LVM2 snapshots (which provide write access to the device) prior to creating the backup archive.
- This speeds up resuming a MySQL instance from a restored backup.
- A bug with the default value handling for command line options was fixed. In version 0.4, if a config file was specified, default values in the script were all changed to blank.
- This means that the config file had to supply values for every variable instead of just the values that need to be changed from default.

afbackup project is a client-server backup system offering several workstations a centralized backup to special backup servers.

The backup on the clients can be started automatically using cron-jobs on the clients, but the more intelligent solution is to start it remotely from a central administrative host. To be independent of tricks like rsh, rcp and so on, that are in fact security holes, this remote start option is implemented internally.

This is done because normally the backup has to be run with root authorization, otherwise files that are read protected by users would not be backed up. Any streaming device can be used for writing the data to it.

The only thing it must be able to do is to distinguish between several files on tape so that it can be positioned directly. Writing backups is normally done sequentially: The next writing to tape goes to the end of the previous write no matter from where you have restored in the meantime.

There is a special possibility for the administrator to change the next writing position, but this should be done only in emergency cases (See: PROGRAMS, "cartis"). Another way to be more flexible here is to configure variable append mode.

beam-back is a simple Python script to save streaming MP3 data. This script has been tested with my.mp3.com and www.shoutcast.com. If you want to make an mp3 for an infinite stream m3u url, start beam-back with the option -v:
xterm -e beam-back.py -v %s

Verbose mode will tell you how much data has been read on a particular stream. Hitting ctrl-c in the xterm will cause beam-back to stop downloading and save the stream to a file.
The default name is "unfinished-stream.mp3" which can be changed with the -u option.

If you find the stream is dropping out and losing link unexpectedly, try the -p option.

Many internet radio sites use the .pls file format but the servers do not treat the mime type correctly :( You can save these streams in the following manner:
1) save the .pls file locally
2) from a linux prompt execute: ./beam-back.py -v pls_filename

Or you can set up both the two mime types:
audio/x-scpls
application/octet-stream
with suffix pls to "xterm -e beam-back.py -v %s"

Finally, if you want to setup cron jobs, you can stop and save a beam-back transfer by doing a kill -INT to the job.

Cedar Backup is a Python package that supports backups of files on local and remote hosts to CD-R or CD-RW media over a secure network connection. Cedar Backup project also includes extensions that understand how to back up MySQL databases and Subversion repositories, and it can be easily extended to support other data sources, as well.
The package is focused around weekly backups to a single disc, with the expectation that the disc will be changed or overwritten at the beginning of each week. If your hardware is new enough, Cedar Backup can write multisession discs, allowing you to add to a disc in a daily fashion. Directories are backed up using tar and may be compressed using gzip or bzip2.
There are many different backup software implementations out there in the free-and open-source world. Cedar Backup aims to fill a niche: it aims to be a good fit for people who need to back up a limited amount of important data to CD-R or CD-RW on a regular basis.
Cedar Backup isnt for you if you want to back up your MP3 collection every night, or if you want to back up a few hundred machines. However, if you administer a small set machines and you want to run daily incremental backups for things like system configuration, current email, small web sites, or a CVS repository, then Cedar Backup is probably worth your time.
Cedar Backup has been developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and is currently supported only on Debian and other Linux systems. However, since it is written in portable Python, it should in theory run without too many problems on other UNIX-like systems which have a working version of the cdrecord and mkisofs utilities.
Enhancements:
- Invalid regular expressions in the configuration are now handled better.
- Other minor documentation cleanups were done.

NFS Backup System is a Perl script that backup system for NFS. The basic function nfsbu is an automated perl-script backup system between an NFS server and an NFS client.
Either by crontab or manual execution, directories listed in the configuration file can be backed up to a directory mounted on the NFS server. In turn, the NFS server uses the client-side script of nsbu (nfsbuc.pl) to move the data from the temporary NFS mount directory to their final places (also specified in the configuration file).
I created this script having been learning Perl for maybe 2 weeks and progressing not much further than page 12 of Programming Perl by Larry Wall and Randal L. Shwartz. Hence you may consider the code badly written, but a quote from the book Id like to include is "a Perl script is correct if its halfway readable and gets the job done before your boss fires you". So I take no blame for the code, Ive commented my code and it worked for me and I make no promises it will work for you.
With regards to licencing, I guess its not really worthy of the full 9 yards, but lets have the happy code hacker ethic of open source development. I.e. something of somewhat basic GPL licence terms and conditions. You may feel inclined to modify the code, in such case if you do, please e-mail me the changes and include the modified code. If youd like to redistribute it with your modifications, please include my name and the original code.
Main features:
- multiple directory backup, with alternative destination directories
- directories are simply listed in a file with their respective destinations
- thorough error checking, if any errors occur e-mail will be sent to the administrator
- checks the status of the NFS server and mountd to prevent any hang-ups from a dead NFS server which is common

Hydra Backup System is a full backup system for UNIX-like systems.
Main features:
- Archives directories and stores archives on one or more FTP servers
- Includes a graphical client (built with the PyQT toolkit) and a command-line client for local or remote backup administration
- Control how often directories are backed up (daily, weekly, or monthly)
- Exclude directories from backups (e.g. backup /etc/ without backing up /etc/apache)
- Uses Pyro for client-server communication