Back Up to CD with Cedar Backup [LWN.net]

Cedar Backup is a backup package that has been written by Kenneth J. Pronovici, it works on POSIX-compliant operating systems and has been released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

[Cedar Solutions]

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 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.

The code is a second-generation effort, according to the project history. It started out as a Perl application, and was later changed to Python and renamed.

Unlike more traditional tape-based backup systems, Cedar Backup is squarely aimed at the use of common and inexpensive CDR media. A big advantage of CD-based backups is the ability to read the backup media on just about every computer that one can buy today.

The online manual describes the numerous Cedar Backup features:

Supports master/client machines on a network.
Uses ssh-based encryption for moving backup data between machines.
Runs with a four-stage backup process.
The backups are fired off from a series of cron scripts.
Writes backups to CDR and CDRW media types.
Supports multi-session disks.
Writable DVD support is planned for a future release.
Performs daily, weekly and incremental backup types.
Backups are initiated from a command line interface.
Configuration information is stored in an XML-formatted file.
Sends error messages via email.
Stores directories as tar files with optional compression.
Comes with extensions for backing up subversion and MySQL data.
Allows user-supplied extensions for backing up other types of data.
Restore operations work on any machine.

Version 2.6.0 of Cedar Backup was released last week, it adds minor feature enhancements and bug fixes: "This release is focused around a wide-ranging set of enhancements, bugfixes, and documentation updates. The list of changes is fairly large, although not much of the core functionality was touched."

The software is available as a Debian package, or an easily installed Python script. Installation on a Fedora Core 3 system was simply a matter un-tarring the source and running the install script. The dependencies of the package include the Python language on all machines, and a number of CD-specific utilities on the master machine.

If you need to back up a single machine, or a group of machines, Cedar Backup is worth investigating.

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Back Up to CD with Cedar Backup

Posted Sep 25, 2005 10:40 UTC (Sun) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763) [Link]

Sounds interesting, if not radically new and different. Just in case anyone was ever interested, I'm running a home-grown backup system based on rdiff-backup and flexbackup, with 4 components:

* Daily rdiff-backup to mirror crucial parts of the filesystem
(eg home, boot, etc, var/www, usr/local)
* Weekly flexbackup to build snapshots from rdiff-backup mirrors
* Burn compressed snapshots to writeable DVD, with checksumming etc
* Interactive rdiff-backup restore, so that I can see which increments
I have for each area, and restore (eg) /etc to any earlier state

Oh well, I can provide a copy of the script if anyone wants it. It's provisionally entitled "BackRest" - reassuringly supportive :-)