WereSync 0.3.1

Incrementally clones Linux drives

A lone hard drive stands atop a data heap, staring at the full moon. Suddenly, it transforms…into a bootable clone of your drive, whirring hungrily at the digital moon.

WereSync takes a Linux hard drive and effectively clones it, but works incrementally so you don’t have to spend so long backing up each time. Additionally, WereSync can clone to a smaller drive, if your data will fit on the smaller drive. Because WereSync uses rsync to copy, it can copy a running drive, though certain parts of state may not be preserved.

Why Use WereSync?

Hopefully, you think this project looks amazing and you want to try it right away. However, you may be skeptical about the usefulness of WereSync. You may be thinking, I can do this exact same thing using gparted or ddrescue. Hear me out! There are a few reasons to use WereSync over the other tools.

First and foremost, most other cloning tools require confidence in one’s technical skill. dd will easily destroy your drive, gparted requires knowing what flags and partition types to use, and CloneZilla is just about the opposite of user friendly. WereSync primarily attempts to help people who don’t want to spend the time and effort to learn how to safely use a cloning tool.

But WereSync also has some of its own features. It contains the ability to properly copy a partition table to a new drive and format the new drive. It uses rsync to copy so, unlike most other cloning tools, it will update incrementally – saving time. WereSync has good default directory exclusions (such as /dev or /proc) so it won’t copy parts of your system which should not be copied. On top of this WereSync will create new UUIDs for the partitions on the cloned drive, allowing the clone to be used alongside the original drive. But the clone will still be bootable because WereSync updates the fstab and reinstalls the boot loader. Not to mention it can complete the entire clone while leaving the original drive running (“hot cloning”), unlike dd or CloneZilla.

All of this is accomplished with one button click.

Installation

WereSync can be installed using the setup.py file.

$ ./setup.py install

If you have pip installed, you can easily install WereSync with the following command:

$ pip install weresync

For more in-depth instructions, see the installation documentation.

Basic Usage

Note: WereSync requires root capabilities to run because it has to access block devices.

The gui can be launched with the command:

$ sudo weresync-gui

Which generates the following GUI, though generally the advanced options are unneeded:

To see the options for the terminal command use:

$ weresync -h

To copy from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb (the two drives must have the same partition scheme) use:

$ sudo weresync /dev/sda /dev/sdb

For more information, including how to copy the partition table from drive to another, see the Basic Usage documentation page.

Documentation

Documentation can be found on the Python Package Index.

Contributing and Bug Reports

First, take a look at our contribution guidelines.

To contribute simply fork this repository, make your changes, and submit a pull request. Bugs can be reported on the issue tracker

Licensing

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Licensing is in the LICENSE.txt file in this directory.

Acknowledgments

Huge thanks to the creators of:

• rsync, whose software allowed this project to be possible.

• GNU Parted

• And GPT fdisk