darfortie 1.0.1

A utility that extends and simplifies using dar (Disk ARchive) for doing routine incremental backups.

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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For a complete list of options, run:

python darfortie --help

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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.

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

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