darfortie

Darfortie is a front-end for the dar (Disk ARchive) utility (http://dar.linux.free.fr/). It adds functionality to the dar utility and makes it simpler to use for creating incremental backups. It is meant to facilitate a more convienent backup strategy, typically one run periodically by a cron task.

The utility can be run repeatedly with the same parameters, and each run will generate a new incremental archive based on the last one created. It will search the directory where the current archive is being created for past reference archives, or a directory can be specified to search in (-I).

The first backup is created without the incremental option (-i).

Further incremental backups are created using the -i option and the same (base) name. Darfortie adds the date/time to the final name to make it unique. It relies on this naming convention to find the most recent reference backup it should use.

It is suggested that for the base name you adopt a convention such as:

machine_daily

where “machine” is the machine name being backed up, and “daily” is for daily incremental backups. The end result would result in names like:

machine_daily_20160228T0352UTC.1.dar
machine_daily_20160228T0403UTC_based_on_20160228T0352UTC.1.dar

A configuration file can be passed through to dar by using the -c switch. If not specified, dar will search for and use any dar configuration file it normally would (ie. /etc/darrc, ~/.darrc). See the dar man page for details on its structure (“CONDITIONAL SYNTAX”).

It also allows you to pass thru dar prune paths.

Install darfortie by running:

1. Installing Python (either v2 or v3) if not already installed.

2. Download a configuration file to use with the -c option at https://github.com/kagalle/darfortie/blob/master/darfortie.conf.

3. Run pip install -i https://pypi.python.org/pypi darfortie

If this is done as a normal user, then the install puts the package in

/home/ken/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/darfortie

and creates an execuatable such that the application can be run by:

$ ./local/bin/darfortie

If installed as root, then the install is done into

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/darfortie

and the executable is created as:

/usr/local/bin/darfortie

which is normally on the system PATH.

For a complete list of options, run:

python darfortie --help

This is BETA software. Use at your own risk. Please:

1. Test for suitability before using for “real” data.

2. During testing, use “dar -d …” to compare the created backup against the filesystem.

3. For testing, do a complete restore to a separate filesystem and compare results.

There is an older bash-based version in the “bash_version” directory, kept ONLY for historical reasons.

There is currently no restore option - use the dar utility directly to do restores.