Overview

dups is a simple backup utility using rsync for its heavy lifting while adding some convenience on top.

To reduce disk space and subsequent backup times, dups relies on rsyncs --link-dest option which hardlinks to existing unchanged files.

Motivation

Being unable to find a backup utility which would allow me to...

• backup selected files and folders
• exclude files and folders based on their path or patterns
• easily access stored files without special tools
  (This includes the backup software itself)
• doesn't come with to much bloat

...I ended up writing my own.
This is not to say other software is bad, just not what I was looking for.

Getting Started

See deployment for notes on how to deploy dups on a live system.

Prerequisites

Required system packages:

rsync

Required python packages:

# Runtime
paramiko
ruamel.yaml>=0.15.0

# Runtime (Optional)
dbus-python  # Daemon support
pygobject  # Desktop notification support

# Unittests
pytest

Installing

After all prerequisites have been met, dups can be installed with:

$ git clone https://github.com/linuxwhatelse/dups
$ cd dups
$ python setup.py install

System files for dbus, systemd etc. can be included by setting INCLUDE_DATA_FILES prior to running the installation.
This will require root access to copy the files to their respective location and is therefore ill-advised for live systems.
For live systems, see deployment instead.

$ export INCLUDE_DATA_FILES="systemd dbus desktop"
$ python setup.py install

For possible values see get_data_files in setup.py.

Build files/scripts for some distributions can be found in data/pkg/.

Usage

For a full setup guide and usage examples see the wiki.

As a quick overview, here's dups main help message.
Individual commands may have additional arguments.

usage: dups [-h] [-u [USER]] [-c [CONFIG]] <command> ...

It deduplicates things - Backup as simple as possible.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -u [USER], --user [USER]
                        Pretend to be this user for reading the config file,
                        writing logs etc. while preserving the original users
                        access rights. Only useful when run with elevated
                        privileges.
  -c [CONFIG], --config [CONFIG]
                        Use this config file instead.

Commands:
  <command>
    backup (b)          Start a new backup.
    list (l)            List backups.
    info (I)            Retrieve detailed backup info.
    modify (m)          Modify the given backup(s).
    restore (r)         Start a new restore.
    remove (rm)         Remove one or more backups.
    log                 Print backup/restore logs.
    include (i)         List/Add/Remove include items.
    exclude (e)         List/Add/Remove exclude items.
    daemon (d)          Start a daemon instance.

Deployment

Packages for some distributions are automatically built and are available in the release section.

Additionally, the following distributions have a version accessible through their package-manager.

Distribution	Link
archlinux	aur - python-dups-git

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Authors

• tadly - Initial work - tadly

Credits

• Andela Denaro - Logo design - andeladenaro

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 - see the LICENSE file for details