Overview of fwbackups

A feature-rich user backup program that allows you to backup your documents on a one-off or recurring scheduled basis. It is compatible with MacOS and Linux systems with Python 3 and GTK 4.

Note: fwbackups is in maintenance only mode. See below for details.

Table of contents:

• Features
• User guide
• Building & Installation
• Usage
• Translations
• Known Issues
  • Linux-specific
• Maintenance status

Features

• Simple interface for configuring new backups or restoring documents from a previous backup
• Multiple backup formats: directory copy or tar archive
  • Incremental backup support (directory copy only)
  • Compression (archive format only)
  • Exclude files or folders
• Send backups to remote hosts with SFTP/SSH
• Automatic backup organization and cleanup
• Restore existing backup sets

User guide

The most recent version of user guide is available online, in HTML or PDF, here.

Building & Installation

If your distribution offers fwbackups in its software repositories, it is recommended you install fwbackups that way instead.

fwbackups is also available as a Flatpak image under the name com.diffingo.fwbackups. Please note it leverages system binaries, so make sure you have a cron daemon (such as cronie) and rsync installed if you want to use the direct copy engine.

For instructions on how to build from source, read on in INSTALL.md.

Usage

The fwbackups desktop entry starts the backup administrator, a GUI tool to manage backup sets or perform one-time backups and restore operations.

It can also be started from the CLI:

fwbackups

An existing backup set can be run manually by executing:

fwbackups-run SetName1 SetName2 [...]

To start a one-time backup without an existing set configuration, use:

fwbackups-runonce /src/Path1 /src/Path2 [...] /destination

Execute either command with the --help parameter for full options and usage details.

Translations

Translations are available here - you're welcome to add or correct translations!

Known Issues

Linux-specific

• If you previously installed fwbackups a 1.43.3 release candidate from source (for example on Ubuntu), please remove the /usr/share/fwbackups/fwbackups directory manually before installing 1.43.4.
• An issue was identified in the previous version of fwbackups (1.43.3) where after upgrading, the backup schedule may have been erased. If you have been affected by this problem, simply open the administrator utility and then close it to reschedule all backups.

Maintenance status

fwbackups is in maintenance mode, and releases will be published for only major bugfixes (or if a new feature is added *and tested- with a pull request).

Although I would love to keep working on fwbackups, I unfortunately no longer have the free time to give fwbackups the attention that it deserves. I have learned a lot through maintaining fwbackups and want to thank all the users for the support, feature requests, pull requests. I hope that you still find the software useful.

Given the above, the plans around the 1.44 C++ rewrite of fwbackups are also on hold. The cplusplus branch of this repo has a functional, cross-platform Qt4-based UI and cmake build system with limited bindings to boxbackup, but should be considered as abandoned/for reference only.