This project backs up files from the computers in my house. It started as a python wrapper around 'rsback', which itself is a perl wrapper around 'rsync'. Rsback does a really nice job of using rsync's hard linking to save multiple backups of a volume without wasting space on files that stay the same day after day. For more info on that feature, see the 'link-dest' option in the man page for rsync.
Rsback is meant to be run as a cron job, but I wanted a daemon that would check every so often (10 minutes) and back up anything that was at least 'so old' (a day). So early versions of flashback simply looped forever, and when it was time to do a backup, it would create a temporary rsback config file and then call rsback. After a while, I decided that it was silly to be setting up rsback for these temporary jobs when I could just call rsync myself.
Flashback is a "no frills" backup package. It takes its orders from a few config files, and it writes its status in two output files. I share these status files via a web server, and that has been a pretty adequate way of checking in on my backups.
This has been a very fun project, and it is useful as well. I hope you enjoy it. If you have questions or comments, please contact me.
Alan Porter ([email protected])