Well now you can save the lame excuses for why you don’t floss. I’ve written ibid, a simple tool for performing incremental backups on Linux and Unix-like systems — possibly also Mac OS X, I haven’t checked yet. And who knows, maybe it can even be made to run under Windows.
Incremental backups
An incremental backup is a backup of just those files that have changed since the last backup.
Many people use mirroring for backups, periodically duplicating essential files to some destination, such as a spare external hard drive, replacing those copies with fresh copies on each backup. This approach is economical in terms of the storage space used, but it only allows you to restore the latest version of a given file. If you have a file called my_novel.doc and you mirror it to a spare hard drive, then you accidentally delete half of it but don’t notice until after the next time you mirror it to that hard drive, then the pre-accident version of my_novel.doc is gone forever.
With a true backup system like ibid, the pre-accident backup copy of my_novel.doc still exists; the post-accident backup copy is separate. The main drawback to this safer approach, of course, is that the more backups you do, the more space you need.
For a long time I used a makeshift system that backed up files to blank CDs or DVDs, but it was slow and difficult to use and it required my constant attendance (for swapping discs in and out) and very often the disc burner would crap out at the last minute after half an hour of burning and produce an unreadable disc. I didn’t trust the archives that I created with this system; it was annoying to have to render botched discs unreadable with scissors all the time (for privacy reasons); and the more backups I did, the more crowded with discs my safe-deposit box got.
Then I discovered Jungledisk, a commercial “infinite filesystem” service that’s easy to use and has good privacy and security features, not to mention reasonable fees. In conjunction with davfs it can be made to act just like a mounted filesystem.
Ibid doesn’t care if you’re using Jungledisk or some other destination service or media. It simply copies the files you ask for to the target directory tree. The backed-up copies are just plain files residing under their original names in a plain filesystem, so retrieving old data is simple.
Here are ibid’s other main features:
- Written as a single Perl file, no complicated build/install process;
- Limit sessions by size;
- Exclude files and directories by pattern (using Perl “regular expressions”);
- Files with multiple “hard links” stored only once — link names stored separately;
- Files re-backed up when they change;
- Files not re-backed up if they’re merely renamed (the new name is stored separately);
- Can run unattended, and even at automated intervals (e.g. via cron).
You can download it here. At some point soon perhaps I will create a proper website for it, at which time I will update this blog post with the new information; meanwhile, this is the definitive home of ibid (and I will keep the copy at the above link up to date with bugfixes and other changes).
Here is the documentation for ibid.
Continue reading “Ibid: Incremental backups to infinite disk”
The trophy itself was ugly as sin and tremendously heavy — cubical black base made of solid neutronium, near as I could tell, with a badly-etched plaque stuck on it and supporting a freakish oblong colored glass ovoid, which actually looked kind of cool at one point when I set it down on a table and some light came from behind it. The fifteen winners hefted their trophies around the club like Sisyphus. Some who weren’t careful enough with theirs found that the glass ovoid snapped easily off of the base.