dparrish.com

If you’re one of the lucky few using dbackup, and want to upgrade from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1 so things work (I really shouldn’t use a minor version number increase to fix such a major bug), you’ll probably want to run the following command in your backup storage root:

rename 's/^([a-z./]+).(d+).(d+).(d+-d+-d+-d+-d+-d+).(meta|data)$/
      sprintf("%s.%03d.%03d.%s.%s", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5)/ex' */*

This should be run as all one line. It requires the rename perl script, which is in the perl package on Debian/Ubuntu at least. If you don’t have it, grab it here.

I’ve released a new version of dbackup today, version 1.1.1. This version fixes a sorting problem, which you would see if you ever get above level 10 in a backup run.

You can download the new version at:

Along with this release, I’m also opening up my git repository, so you can grab the latest source yourself. If you’re using Cogito, which I highly recommend, you can run:

cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/dbackup

For instructions on using dbackup, see my original post.

dbackup is a disk-based client-server backup system for Linux or other UNIX systems.

It works on the principal that disks are cheaper and more reliable than tapes.

Backups are started by cron probably on a daily basis by the client. The client backs up individual filesystems / directories with tar and sends the result to the server, which stores them in a simple tree-based directory structure.

Restores are trivial, either by using the supplied restore client, or by simply copying the appropriate tar files off the server and uncompressing them.

Features

• Backup very large filesystems as long as you have the disk space
• Works with very large numbers of servers / filesystems
• No state is kept on the client, it’s all on the server
• Backup to multiple backup servers in round-robin
• Configuration can be global or per-server
• Authentication for client restores (optional)
• Supports optional gzip or bzip2 compression
• Supports client-side gpg encryption
• Trivial procedure for restores
• Daily / Full incremental backups

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