About Backtory

Backtory is a backup utility for unix-like operating systems. Here is a short feature outline:

• command line interface (no GUI required)
• differential backups
• signed and encrypted backup archives
• remote storage via network
• emergency recovery helpers
• hooks for custom actions before/after backups
• support for ZFS and LVM2 snapshots

Project News

2011-01-05 First alpha release of libsynctory

Today, a first alpha version of libsynctory has been released. libsynctory's core functionality is now quite complete. It supports fingerprinting, fingerprint-based diff calculation and revision reconstruction (patching) from the original file and a binary difference.

Warning: As of now, libsynctory is neither well documented, nor well tested. It lacks a proper error handling interface, and furthermore, I didn't care for thread safety so far. However, this shouldn't keep you from giving it a try and testing it a bit...

2010-06-20 Progress on libsynctory

libsynctory development concentrates all efforts to create a library providing an API to the core functionality for differential backups (such as fingerprinting, fingerprint-based difference calculation and binary patching). The library currently compiles on Linux and FreeBSD; so far it only provides fingerprinting.

2010-05-15 New application design

For some weeks, I have been meditating about a completely different application design using an agent-like daemon and TCP-based remote control of backups on "victim" hosts. Today I moved everythin in the repository to a backup branch (old-py) and cleaned up default so I can start on a blank sheet with the reimplementation.

2010-03-06 Waiting for libvar

It's been decided: before doing any more code work for Backtory, I will finalize the specification of the VAR archive format and implement an appropriate library. This may take some time and make Backtory subject to further delays, but I feel this step is inevitably necessary.

Currently there is no project homepage for libvar (I am too busy with other things to set it up), so please check here or my blog for updates on this matter.

Backtory Blog