ANN: Smackup - Smart Backup
Foosland
freeware or commercial, I finally gave up and wrote my own.
It's a command-line program, no fancy GUI (yet?), but it has some
attributes not found in any other backup program that I'm aware of.
Advantages:
* The main backup directory contains a mirror of the directories you
backed up. Previous revisions of files, or deleted files, are kept in
the "archive" backup subdirectory. This has the advantages of a mirror
backup (easy to restore) and a incremental backup (can get previously
backed up versions of files).
* Does not use the archive file attribute to determine what files need
to be backed up. This can be altered if you share/unshare a directory
in Windows, and in other situations, falsely indicating all files need
to be backed up. Also, if you rely on the archive attribute, files can
only be backed up to one location. Instead, Smackup uses a combination
of the file size and file modified datestamp to determine that a file
has been altered. You can use Smackup to, for example, back up your
files to both a removeable hard drive and a network share.
* If a file is moved, it does not make another backup of the file.
Instead the file is also moved in the backup directory.
* Does not use a .zip file or any other kind of monolithic file for
the backup, ensuring that there is no limit to the amount of data that
can be backed up, and no chance of losing all your data if one file
gets corrupted.
* No need to worry about full vs. differential vs. incremental backups
vs. mirroring. There is only one kind of backup, and it provides the
best attributes of all of them.
* If you start running out of space, it's easy to clean up old
backups, just delete the oldest few Archive subdirectories.
* No limit to the size of data you are backing up. Many other backup
programs choke around the 4 gig mark.
* Written in Python and has no external dependencies other than the
standard Python install. Includes a Windows executable if you don't
have Python installed.
Disadvantages:
* Does not do any kind of compression. If you have a lot of media
files however, this is not much of a disadvantage as they do not
compress anyway.
* Does not do a "diff" of the files, meaning that if you have a large
file that changes slightly between backups, the entire file is backed
up every time you do a backup. Again, if you have a lot of media
files, the amount of space they take up will overwhelm saving a few
bytes by storing individual file diffs.
* Not designed to work efficiently over a wide area network or over
the Internet, though it will happily back up to a network share.
* No GUI to configure what files you wish to backup. However, the
config file is a simple text file and a GUI could easily be added
later.
I've been using it for many months on several different computers and
it's been stable for a long time so I thought I'd release it to the
world as an official 1.0 release. If you are interested you can get
it here: