fwbackups

...I decided to tackle problem I recently found out about in fwbackups. If there is a large amount of stdout or stderr output in a short amount of time from the backup subprocesses, fwbackups hangs. That level of output should never normally happen while backing up user files, but if /proc or /dev is included in a backup for example then it could trigger the problem.

After 8 hours [1] of backup benchmarks, I've concluded that not only is python's tarfile module horrendously slow (with gzip compression enabled, it is consistently two times slower than calling "tar" from the command line as a subprocess) but that I unfortunately have to reverse the feature I added in 1.43.3rc3 that adds the display of the file currently being backed up in the GUI. Sorry in advance, but it was the only way to keep both performance and prevent fwbackups from hanging mid-backup in certain situations.

[1] which as it so happens, is also how many hours there are in the first season of How I Met your Mother. It's a hilarious show!

First of all I wanted to mention I've registered #fwbackups irc.freenode.net, so you you have an account feel free to come by and discuss and ideas, feedback or bugs.

I've also been learning C++ (slowly) so I'm going to rewrite fwbackups into C++ but keep the interface the same. In other words, you shouldn't notice a thing except it being much, much faster! A friend also recently joined the development team, so hoepfully 1.44 won't take too long and we're planning to release with support for archives, direct copy as well as incremental backups à-la-Time Machine, have a backend plug-in system and have it run naitively in OS X too!

I've been thinking about the future of fwbackups, and the engines are causing me a bit of trouble. TimeVault is pretty cool and I'd like to implement something similar, but to do that I have to scrap the tar and tar+gz engines. I could also forget the TimeVault-like features for now and implement incremental backups. So, what do you think? I've got a poll running so you can vote for your preferred option on the left.

On another note, 1.43.2rc1 will include a minimize to system tray function so that fwbackups can stay in the tray as an applet :)

Because of time constrains, it's getting tougher to upkeep every one of my open source projects - If you'd like to help out developing one of them, please let me know.

fwbackups 1.43.1 is done... It includes a new "follow links" backup option, fixes several bugs present in 1.43.0 and also has a full set of documentation installed to /usr/share/gnome/help/fwbackups.

Sorry for the inconvienience, but it turns out automatic backups in 1.43.0 doesn't work at all so if you're using automatic backup, it is a good idea to update to 1.43.1.