cpio archive for UNIX

cpio is a binary file archiver & a file format basically for the UNIX based systems that ends with .cpio file extensions. Available under the GNU license, cpio software utility was meant to be a tape archiver that was originally part of PWB/UNIX and that was also part of UNIX System III & UNIX System V and is a stream of files & directories in a single archive. Though its later versions, such as tar, are more popular & considered to be a better solutions that cpio itself but it's usage in the RPM Package Manager, the Linux Kernel 2.6 series' initramfs, Oracle's distribution of its software in the cpio format and Apple's 'pax' installer archive continues to make cpio an important archive format.

The header of a cpio archive contains information such as the file names, time stamp, owners & permissions and was designed to store backups onto a tape device in a contiguous manner. Like the Tar format, CPIO archives are often compressed using Gzip and distributed as .cpgz or .cpio.gz files and supports the binary, old & new ASCII, crc, HPUX binary, HPUX old ASCII, old tar & POSIX.1 tar archive formats.

The cpio utility was standardized in POSIX.1-1988 & was dropped from later revisions, starting with POSIX.1-2001 due to its 8 GB filesize limit. The POSIX standardized pax utility can be used to read and write cpio archives instead. The latest release of cpio is version 2.10 that was released on 20-June-2009 after minor bugfixes.

Cobian Backup 8 backup software for Windows

Cobian Backup 8 (Blackmoon) is the only open source backup software for Windows which comes with GUI. Written in Delphi by Luis Cobian of the Umea University, Cobian Backup 8 is 100% free & donation-supported backup software for Microsoft Windows platform.

The latest version of Cobian Backup is 9.5.1.212 which supports Unicode, FTP, compression (Zip, SQX, 7z), encryption (including Blowfish, Rijndael, DES, RSA-Rijndael, incremental and differential backup. It also supports long file names (upto 32,000 characters) for all backup types except ZIP (which supports only 256 characters). The software may be installed as an application or as a service running in the background. Multilingual support is implemented via user-submitted language files.

Blackmoon is a multi-threaded program that can be used to schedule & backup your files and directories from their original location to other directories/drives in the same computer or any other computer on the network. FTP backup is also supported in both directions (download and upload). Blackmoon comes in two tastes - application and service. The program uses very few resources and can be running on the background on your system, checking your backup schedule and executing your backups when necessary.

Cobian Backup 8 is not an usual backup application: it only copies your files and folders in original or compressed mode to other destination, creating a security copy as a result. So Cobian Backup can be better described as a "Scheduler for security copies". Cobian Backup supports several methods of compression and strong encryption.

The source files of Cobian Backup 8 can be downloaded from Source Forge while Cobian Backup 9 (Amanita) is not going to be an open source software.

Bonkey (The Backup Monkey)

Bonkey (The Backup Monkey) is an open source backup software available for Windows & Mac platform which can backup files only which match a certain criteria to most of the storage devices. Bonkey has specifically been designed to be used in conjunction with Amazon S3, the guys which provide cheap online storage. You can download the code and change it to your custom need if the necessity so arises. Bonkey allows you to:

• backup to multiple locations, including Amazon S3, SFTP, FTP, Windows shares & even local disks
• backup MS-SQL Server databases
• backup automatically at the scheduled time
• email any errors during backup to your email address
• backup only files that have changed, or a snapshot of the files you select
• compress & encrypt files during backup
• transfer files between different locations using drag & drop
• show built-in help

The most important part with Bonkey is that it runs as a Windows service & there's no need to login for it to start, uses less memory and is invisible. The summary screen shows you all you need to know & makes managing your backup groups easier. Bonkey relies on a lot of third party love, all provided free of charge by their respective developers: Bonkey runs on Java; S3 is run by Amazon; Eclipse provides the application framework and icons; Apache supplies a number of libraries and superconnected604 drew the chain-smoking briefcase bearing primate.

Some of the features of the open source backup software are:

• there's a file transfer mode for easier drag & drop transfers
• you can use synchronisation to remove out of date files from backup targets
• it has a built-in restore wizard to restore to a folder or original file locations
  

Bacula - Open Source Backup

Bacula is an open source network backup solution that is written in C++ and is relatively easy to use while offering many advanced storage management features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files. Bacula is basically an enterprise ready backup software that permits you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds.

The latest stable release of Bacula is 3.0.2 which supports Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX, OpenBSD, HP-UX, Tru64, IRIX, Linux, UNIX and Windows backup clients, and a range of professional backup devices including tape libraries. Administrators and operators can configure the system via a command line console, GUI or web interface; its back-end is a catalog of information stored by MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.

Bacula supports technologies & networks such as:

• CRAM-MD5
• Cyclic redundancy check
• GZIP
• Large file support
• Logical volume management
• MD5/SHA
• POSIX ACL
• Public key infrastructure
• TCP/IP
• Transport layer security
• Unicode/UTF-8
• Volume snapshot service
  

BackupPC open source backup system

BackupPC is an open-source, high-performance, enterprise-grade free backup software that can be used for taking up data backup for Linux, UNIX, Solaris, Windows XX and Mac OSX PCs & laptops to a server's disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install & maintain as it comes with a web-based frontend. The most stable release, BackupPC 3.2.0 beta 0 was released on April 5th, 2009 is published under the GNU General Public License..

The most important thing with BackupPC is that no client is necessary to run it, as the server is itself a client for several protocols that are handled by other services native to the client OS. For instance, BackupPC incorporates a Server Message Block (SMB) client that can be used to back up network shares of computers running Windows. Paradoxically, under such a setup the BackupPC server can be located behind a NAT'd firewall while the Windows machine operates over a public IP address. While this may not be advisable for SMB traffic, it is more useful for web servers running SSH with GNU tar and rsync available, as it allows the BackupPC server to be stored in a subnet separate from the web server's DMZ.

Areca Backup

Areca Backup is an Open Source backup solution designed for personal use on Linux & Windows machines. Developed in the Java programming language, Areca Backup is available under the General Public License (GPL) v2 and allows its users to select a set of files, & folders, to be backed up. You can specify backup location and configure post-backup actions (like sending backup reports by email or launching custom shell scripts) after taking backup in ZIP/ZIP64 compression or AES 128 & AES 256 encryption which are readable by WinZip or other archivers.

Areca supports full, incremental & differential backups and uses the file's size & last modification time to detect modified files. If one of these attributes is modified (whatever its value is), the file is flagged as modified. This allows a fast detection of modified files.

The most important features of Areca Backup:

• Simple to set up
  The configuration of Areca Backup is stored in an XML file which can be edited with Areca's graphical user interface.
• Versatile
  Areca Backup can use advanced backup modes (like delta backup) or simply produce a basic copy of your source files as a standard directory or zip archive.
• Interaction
  Track different versions of a specific file, browse your archives, recover or view specific files, merge a set of archives... and much more.
  

Amanda

AMANDA, aka Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is basically an Open Source archiving tool or data backup system which allows the administrators to set up a single master backup server to backup data from multiple hosts over the network to backup mediums using a client-server model which includes atleast:

• the backup server & client itself
• a tape server
• an index server

All these servers may not necessarily reside on the same machine. With Amanda, one can backup data residing on multiple computers on a network. AMANDA uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities & can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Amanda uses Samba, Cygwin or a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers as well.

AMANDA started as a university project for the University of Maryland which was later released under a BSD style of a license and is now available both as an open source community edition & a fully supported enterprise edition. It runs almost on any Unix or Linux based systems and may also be combined with a native Win32 client that comes with support for open files.

Amanda supports both tape & disk-based backups and provides some useful functionality not available in other backup products like tape-spanning, ie, if a backup set does not fit in one tape, it will be split into multiple tapes. Among its key features is an intelligent scheduler which optimizes use of computing resources across backup runs.

Open source backup softwares

It's not that you will only find paid softwares for taking backup for your files. You can rely upon the following open source backup softwares for taking backups:

• AMANDA
• Areca Backup
• BackupPC
• Bacula
• Cobian Backup 8
• cpio
• DirSync Pro
• DAR
• dump
• duplicity
• FlyBack
• Mondo
• rsync
• tar
• TimeVault
• Venti
• Zmanda Recovery Manager