BackBurner stream based archiving software
News
April 5, 1999: Rev 0.90 VERY stable version. Added logging support and support for reading defaults from a configuration file. Ran more tests and updated documentation. This is a release candidate.
April 5, 1999: Rev 0.60 VERY stable version. Cleaned up a whole mess of problems. I was mixing my paradigm betwen sysopen type operations and open type operations, which was causing some very subtle bugs. Also, I was assuming that perls write function was the opposite of its read function... no such luck. Cleaned up these problems and my blocking problems also went away, so defaults are now set back for reasonable efficiency. Perl's greatest asset (you just type what you want and it does it) is also it's greatest liability (when you are doing something you think you want but you shouldnt really want, Perl will just do it anyway instead of complaining about being asked to do nonsense).
April 5, 1999: Rev 0.51 No blocking factors besides 512 work, I am not sure why, I am looking into it. In the mean time, I changed all blocking factors to 512. This hurts performance, but increases reliability.
April 4, 1999: Rev 0.5, Initial beta release.
What Is Backburner?
At the highest level, backburner is a collection of PERL scripts that leverage existing parts of the Unix system and allow users to backup and restore verified and compressed images of any mountable file-system, network drive, or even a disk partition. This should allow even unrecognized operating system partitions to be ghosted and restored via your Unix system, and allow recognized file-systems to be backed up and restored in whole or in parts.
These backups can be done with virtually any Unix supported media. Existing wrappers support floppy disks for the poor but brave, and CD-Recordable and CD-ReWritable disks for the rest of us. Also, a wrapper for any mountable media allows the use of Zip disks, NFS mounts, or any other accessible locations (including even FTP transfers). Extensions to support virtually any media are straightforward to create as simple modifications of the existing scripts.
For the experienced Unix programmer, BackBurner is a collection of tools that allow a Unix stream to be captured in stasis to any media, then reconstituted at a later date as a playback of an exact duplicate of the original stream. This capability, tied together with powerful stream oriented Unix utilities such as dd, tar and gzip allows tremendous functionality and flexibility.