FSVS - a fast system versioning tool.
http://fsvs.tigris.org
Developer mailing list at dev@fsvs.tigris.org
Users mailing list at users@fsvs.tigris.org
(C)opyrights by philipp@marek.priv.at 2005, 2006
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
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
What does it do?
fsvs is a backup/archival-tool, which uses subversion backends for storage. This means that previous versions of all files are available in case of hardware problems, data loss, virus infections, user problems etc.
fsvs is used to take snapshots of the current machine and restore them; all advanced operations (taking diffs, merging, etc.) should be done via some repository browser.
fsvs runs currently only on linux.
Why was it written?
Well, mostly to scratch an itch :-)
Backup methods using rsync have no or very limited history,
svn saves no metadata and needs double local storage, svk doesn't understand
all file types and is (IMO) too slow for full system versioning.
How is it used?
Please take a look at subversion [1]'s documentation; subversion's libraries (and by implication apr [2]) are needed for operation. See also the subversion book [3].
First install subversion (and, by implication, apr). Next compile fsvs.
cd src
make
Make a repository somewhere, preferably on another machine.
svnadmin create /path/to/repos
Create a local directory for the "working copy administrative area". If you'd like to use another path, just set the environment variable WAA to it.
mkdir -p /var/spool/fsvs
Initialize fsvs.
fsvs init svn+ssh://username@machine/path/to/repos Define ignore patterns - all virtual filesystems (/proc, /sys, etc.), and (assuming that you're in / currently) the temporary files in /tmp:
fsvs ignore DEVICE:0 ./tmp/*
And you're ready to play!
Check your data in:
fsvs commit -m "First import"
See doc/USAGE for more details.
If it bails out with an error, I'd appreciate if you'd run the failing command with the option "-v" (verbose) and send the last lines to the developers mailing list; sometimes it may be necessary to see the complete debug log file, which you can get by using "-v -d".
Notes/Links