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66 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
66 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 85
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Title: HPR0085: Faubackup
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0085/hpr0085.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:16:42
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---
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music
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Packup Public Radio.
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I'm DeepGeek and this episode was originally recorded in April of 2008.
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This episode is a software review of Fallbackup and is part of our series on lightweight applications.
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The lightweight application series is open to all HPR contributors and is OS agnostic.
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Fallbackup is a command line backup tool developed at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlengen Nuremberg.
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Fallbackup is interesting for two reasons.
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The first is that command line nature is particularly given to automating backups.
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And the second reason is that its way of backing up files creates a really easy to use system of versioning.
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First, command line. Upon installing Fallbackup, I was immediately impressed
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in that automatically inserts a script into the Etsy Kron.Daily folder, which gets run daily.
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The script has the default directory is commented out.
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So all I had to do was delete the hash symbol and voila, instant daily backup.
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It was that easy.
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By default, all the defaults can be overwritten by adding the Fallbackup.conf file in the Etsy directory.
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It writes backups to a directory called slash backup.
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You can create this in the root directory or create a partition for it.
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Simply by doing so and pointing the Etsy FS tab file to the appropriate place.
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What I did personally is I bought a spare hard drive and installed it on a separate controller
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than my main disk.
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I then set the disk to go into standby in about half an hour of no use.
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For me, this is a good thing because I want to protect myself against my main disk failing.
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Also, since the second disk is used only rarely, it simply is not used as much as the main disk.
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You can also do a few advanced things with the target of your backups.
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For instance, it will accept the backup directory being on an NFS share just fine.
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But you do have to tell the NFS server to accept this machine's root user as a root user on its system.
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You can also backup over SSH or RSH. The flexibility is there.
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But it really made me fall in love with full backup though, is the way it stores the files it backs up.
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Full backup in its default configuration creates a file structure where for each machine and each major directory,
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it creates a sub directory with a date stamp and copies all the files into that directory.
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Now, you may be thinking, wait a minute, that's a lot of files for a daily backup.
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But does not store all those files.
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Most Linux file systems support what is called hard links.
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Basically, if a file is unchanged, full backup creates a hard link to the file.
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Full backup maintains by default, but you can override this if need be.
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Two annual backups, 12 monthly backups, and four weekly backups.
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Now, if a file is never changed, full backup will store one instance of the file and create 18 links to the same file.
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So the file will be stored once and will appear in many different directories.
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Also, full backup takes advantage of sparse files, which means that if the file has blocks of null space, that space will be saved.
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So, let me tell you what it's like to retrieve a file from backup with full backup.
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It creates a regular file system, which means any method you want to use to get a file back will work.
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You can use regular batch file management tools like LS and CP.
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You can use a favorite graphical file manager like Rocks, Nautilus, Conqueror, Dolphin or Midnight Commander 2.
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If you have FTP or SFTP surface, you can also pull files through that also.
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This is all because it uses regular plain Linux files, so anything works on it.
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If you want, they have a source for its site at filebackup.sf.net.
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Let me set it phonetically.
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Foxtrot Alpha Uniform Bravo Alpha Charlie Kilo Uniform Papa Dot Sierra Foxtrot Dot.
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November Echo Pango.
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You can preview the manual pages there, as well as make inquiries by emailing their mailing list.
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If you decide to try it, I hope you will enjoy it.
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Today's geek tidbit, let's have a little geek haiku.
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Wily Quick Page eludes you handsomely.
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Smack that mouse harder.
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Thank you for listening to Hacker Public League.
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HPR is sponsored by tarot.net, so head on over to CARO.nc for all of us in need.
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Thanks for watching.
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Thanks for watching.
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