bu - Backup tool

​A convenient incremental command line data backup tool written mostly in Unix shell script and Perl and distributed under the BSD copyright.

It is primarily designed to backup files by copying them to a backup directory. I generally refer to this as an NFS backup because the idea is to use a network mounted filesystem for your backup directory so that you have a copy on another machine in case of hardware failure or software error on the local machine. Although, the backup directory can just as well reside on the local host, preferably on a separate hard drive.



Rbu is the successor to bu and is being completely re-written in Perl. It uses rsync to transfer the data and, unlike bu, can backup to remote destinations (e.g. hostname:/backup/dir) as well as to local file systems.

Once it has all or most of bu's original features integrated in, the plan is to rename it to bu with a new version and drop the original bu from the package. In the mean time, they are capable of working along side one another and sharing the same bu configuration file.

Bu News

 

03/10/2005 Version 3.4 beta is released.

Brief list of changes:

  o More platform independent.  Now runs on Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
    FreeBSD, and even MacOS X 10.2.
  o Improved configuration flexability.
  o Configuration and log files are now installed in locations more
    standard to both BSD and Linux.
  o Improved installation and de-installation scripts.
  o Ability to install and work out of the box for regular users,
    as well as root.
  o Miscellaneous bug fixes and code cleanup.
  o Copyright is changed from GPL back to the more relaxed BSD.

I have not done any further work on the CDRW dump features yet. Again, the last known platform they worked on was FreeBSD-4.x. So, for now, expect to use bu only for the NFS backup features for any other platform.