lazybackup - Backup so easy even lazy people will do it

Description

lazybackup is a disk spanning dvd backup program. It is currently implemented as a perl script using dar as the archive engine, and growisofs to burn disks. It only supports single layer disks.

Warning...

Although I have tested it, and it worked well for me this is an initial release, and has not been widely tested yet. Please test your backups. Relying on an untested backup is a risky thing to do.

Goals

It is desired that lazybackup will become a very easy to use backup program that works on many platforms. These platforms should include proprietary systems to ease the migration of data from them to systems based on free software such as GNU/Linux, and BSD. There should be multiple interfaces to it preferably including a dialog based command line, curses, and GTK. Another important desired feature is the ability to recover from lost, or damaged DVD's using parchive2. DVD's are susceptible to multiple kinds of damage, and are error tolerant, but unfortunately there is not a standard way to get DVD drives to report how bad the condition of the disk is. A disk that has seemed to be very reliable may suddenly fail without warning. The best way to achieve these goals may be to port lazybackup to a compiled application that uses the dar, and parchive2 libraries.

Requirements

This program as of the initial release has only been fully tested on debian GNU/Linux with a 2.6.15 kernel.

A DVD drive compatible with dvd+rw-tools
dar version 2.3.0 or later
dvd+rw-tools
mkisofs
perl

Installation

lazybackup is designed to not need to be installed. If the programs it needs are installed in appropriate places it should find them.

Usage

For detailed information about how to use lazybackup please run

lazybackup --man

Getting help

The preferred place to ask for help is the sourceforge mailing lists for lazybackup as this will make answers available to other people. Go to the lazy backup project page [1] click on mail, and there you will see the available mailing lists.
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazybackup/

History

Way back in 2005 when I wanted to backup my GNU/Linux desktop I looked around for backup solutions. I found many. Most of them had to do with backing up to another computer, or to tape. Every other computer I owned had less space than the one I wanted to backup, and I didn't have a tape drive. I seem to remember trying some of the CD/DVD based ones, and had trouble with them. I ended up getting frustrated to the point that I started writing my own tool. I thought it would be a simple little script, but I underestimated the complexity of the problem. Now many hours of work later I have a fairly easy to use disk spanning backup program that will hopefully work well for many people with the hardware they already have.

lazybackup is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

perl components of lazybackup may also be distributed under the terms of the perl Artistic license. See COPYING, Artistic, and GPL for details.

Comments are welcome.

Daniel Patrick Johnson <teknotus@gmail.com>