What's pybackup ?
A python programm for doing backups.
Why do you need another backup utility ?
Two reasons: intelligent (pyactivity and pybackup) and safe (pybackup)
Safe
Well, I simply got fed up of getting buggy backup files stored in CD ROMS. I had a large .tar.gz file and then it corrupted, and I lost 50 mb out of 650 mb. I decided to use a safer method, so that if 1 \% of the file gets corrupted then I don't lose the 100 \% of the file. Yes, I know that bzip2 and probably others can recover from errors, choose the size of block and so on, but that doesn't prevent the menace of getting bursts of faulty bytes and then lose full blocks (100k or 900k ) because small faults. I know too ,that with DVD-RAM you don't worry about compressing files, just copy the entire filesystem into the DVD-RAM, well, that's not my case. I have old CD burners.
Intelligent
With pybackup you won't compress again compressed files, or directories like 'foo-1.3' if you have 'foo-1.3.tgz' in the same dir.
With pyactivity you'll have an idea of those files that changed at the same time and you could do clever incremental