SumiTomohiko / ubackup

Historical backup tool

ubackup

Overview

ubackup is an incremental backup tool for Unix. Features are

• ubackup can backup remote directories to a local directory.
• ubackup can backup local directories to a remote directory.
• ubackup can backup local directories to another local directory.
• ubackup can use SSH for remote backup.
• One backup is placed into into year-month-dayThour:minute:second,millisecond (datetime in format of ISO-8601) directory.
• ubackup uses hard link for incremental backup. If a file is unchanged, ubackup makes a hard link to the previous one.
• ubackup backups not only files itself, but also metadata such as permissions and owners under .meta directories.
• ubackup can handle UTF-8 filename.
• ubackup is open source software under the MIT license.

Requirements

ubackup works on/with

• FreeBSD 9.1/amd64
• flange

Download

tarballs are available at the author's website.

How to install

Requirements

Compiling ubackup needs

• CMake 2.8.11.2

Edit configure.conf

First of all, you must describe settings in configure.conf. configure.conf.sample is a sample of it:

$ cp configure.conf.sample configure.conf
$ vi configure.conf

Configure and compile

Now is the time to compile:

$ ./configure && make && make install

How to use

There are two tools in ubackup -- ubackupme and ubackupyou. ubackupme is one to backup local directories to a remote machine. ubackupyou is a tool to backup remote directories into a local directory.

Backup local directories into a remote directory

If you want to backup your local directories to a remote directory, the command which you must use is:

ubackupme ssh hostname srcdirs... destdir

hostname must be replaced with name of a remote machine.

All arguments from the fourth one but the last are source directoires. The last argument is a destination directory in a remote machine.

Backup remote directories into a local directory

To backup remote directories into a local directory, the command is:

ubackupyou ssh hostname srcdirs... destdir

Backup local directoires into a local directory

ubackup is also useful to backup local directories into another local directory in an external storage. You can use both of ubackupme and ubackupyou:

ubackupme local srcdirs... destdir
ubackupyou local srcdirs... destdir

Results of these two commands are same.

Structure of a backup directory

.meta directory

Each directory has a .meta directory, which contains meta data of files in the directory. A meta data file of foo is .meta/foo.meta. This file has mode, uid and gid in each line.

Backup from the root

Even if you do:

$ cd /foo/bar/baz
$ ubackupme local quux /backup

ubackup backups the quux at /backup/timestamp/foo/bar/baz/quux, not at /backup/timestamp/quux. This means that ubackup does not backup only the given file, but also the parent directoires of it.

Protocol

The line terminator

ubackup uses CRLF for the line terminator.

DIR command

Format: DIR name mode uid gid ctime Response: OK or NG

FILE command

Format: FILE name mode uid gid mtime ctime Response: CHANGED, UNCHANGED or NG

A backuper must memorize name for the next BODY command.

BODY command

Format: BODY size Response: OK or NG

File body follows after a CRLF. A backupee must specify filename with FILE command previously.

SYMLINK command

Format: SYMLINK name mode uid gid ctime src Response: OK or NG

THANK_YOU command

Format: THANK_YOU Response: Nothing (This does not mean "Nothing" command)

A backupee declares the end of connection by this command. A backuper disconnects immediately without any responses.

The author

The author is Tomohiko Sumi.