Ubuntuland

What's pdumpfs?

pdumpfs is a simple daily backup system similar to Plan9's dumpfs which preserves every daily snapshot. pdumpfs is written in Ruby. You can access the past snapshots at any time for retrieving a certain day's file. Let's backup your home directory with pdumpfs!

pdumpfs constructs the snapshot YYYY/MM/DD in the destination directory. All source files are copied to the snapshot directory for the first time. On and after the second time, pdumpfs copies only updated or newly created files and stores unchanged files as hard links to the files of the previous day's snapshot for saving a disk space.

What's New

• 2004-12-15: pdumpfs 1.3 Released!
  
  • An error message for Windows has been fixed
• 2004-08-11: pdumpfs 1.2 Released!
  
  • The options --quiet (-q), --dry-run (-n) has been added
  • The 31 days limit of finding the last backup for incremental backup has been abolished
  • A feature that creates `latest' symbolic link referring to the latest backup has been added
  • Other small modifications has been made
• 2004-07-13: pdumpfs 1.1 Released!
  
  • A bug in error message handling has been fixed
  • Other small modifications has been made
• 2004-06-22: pdumpfs 1.0 Released!
  
  • A Windows GUI is now supported using VisualuRuby
• 2004-05-11: pdumpfs 0.9 Released!
  
  • Some bugs has been fixed including "unexpected next" bug
  • A Windows binary is now available experimentally using Exerb
• 2001-02-19: pdumpfs 0.1 Released!

• Windows GUI

  

  This is a screenshot of pdumpfs working on Windows XP.

  Requirements

• Ruby 1.8.1 or later

Installation

To install pdumpfs from the source code, unpack the package and run makepdumpfs file to your bin directory such as /usr/local/bin. and copy the resulting

Usage

Command Line

   % pdumpfs   

Example

To backup your home directory /home/yourname to /backup, run the following command.

   % pdumpfs /home/yourname /backup >/backup/log 2>/backup/error-log 

On and after the second day, it is a good idea to invoke the backup command with cron daemon. The following setting allows you to backup your home directory every 5 a.m.

    00 05 * * * pdumpfs /home/yourname /backup >/backup/log 2>/backup/error-log 

If the backup system works well, you can retrieve a certain day's file with a file name like /backup/2001/02/19/yourname/...

Excluding Files

To exclude particular files from a backup, you can use the following options.

--exclude=PATTERN

Exclude files or directories matching PATTERN (Regular Expressions in Ruby) from a backup. You can specify the option as many you like. The pattern matching is performed for paths of source files. If the `source directory' given by the command line is a relative path, pattern matching is performed for relative paths including the given path itself. If the `source directory' is an absolute path, pattern matching is performed for absolute paths.

--exclude-by-size=SIZE

Exclude files larger than SIZE from a backup. You can specify SIZE like 100, 100K, 10M, and 1G.

--exclude-by-glob=GLOB

Exclude files matching GLOB from a backup. fnmatch(3) (shell globbing) to the basename of a file is used for matching. You can specify the option as many you like.