Note: this specs are a draft, might change.

Micro Backup Tool

Micro Backup Tool (shorted from here with mbt) is a light-weighted, cross-platform and very simple program for backing-up files.

It is made with python to allows portability on different operative system, and it's main goal is to make is work done without hand-waving.

The project is at very being, so for now the main implementation will be rude and straight to the objective.

Features

• multiple dirctory trees backup
• common compressions
• logs keeping
• easy configuration and schedule
• files ignore with regular expression
• easy customization
• ready to go

How it works

mbt backup files and directories compressing it in a .tar.gz or .zip file, setting the starting point equals to the launcher path. If the directory option is specified mbt backups all the directories listed in the option, excluding (if not explicitly specified) the launcher path.

Fails

Avoiding any type of failures is nearly impossible.

However, a good policy of error handling and process flow can help to reduce the problems.

If something goes wrong the backup process continues, but the error is written on logs (see logs section) and an "unbacked-up" files list is stored (see unbacked-up list subsection).

Logs

mbt writes many kinds of logs in order to:

• allow the user to handle and understand the whole situation, even if it is critical;
• allow the recovery module to try to makes some decisions automatically.

History logs

During the backup process logs are keeped and if something fails it will be written on logs.

Error logs

If something goes wrong while backing up, the process continues but the error log file will be written with error details.

Unbacked-up list

At the end of every backup a list containing "unbacked" up files is written, and with the right option mbt automatically tries to backup again those files (see options section). [TODO: define better this point]

Ignore

mbt allows to specify in the .mbtignore files which directories must be excluded from the backup.

Rules are similar to Git's .gitignore, but may differ slightly due to the different implementation.

• lines that start with # are comments
• leading and trailing spaces ignored unless escaped with
• non-empty lines without ! in front are treated as "exclude" patterns
• non-empty lines with ! in front are treated as "include" patterns and have a priority over all "exclude" ones
• patterns are matched against the filenames relative to the grive root
• a/**/b matches any number of subpaths between a and b, including 0
• **/a matches a inside any directory
• b/** matches everything inside b, but not b itself
• • matches any number of any characters except /
• ? matches any character except /
• .griveignore itself isn't ignored by default, but you can include it in itself to ignore

Guide

Installation

Install with pip

pip install mbt

Usage

Define your own .mbtignore if needed to include or exclude certain files or directories based on their names.

Coming soon...

Options

mbt has options for every need.

Base:

-h, --help	prints help
--verbose	prints verbose output on console
--silent	does not print anything on console (useful with machine integration)

Backup:

-b, --backup_paths
	allows to specify what are the paths to backup
-c, --archive_type
	allows to specify the archive type between: .tar.gz, .zip

Logs:

-l, --logs_disabled
	disables logs
-e, --errorlogs_disabled
	disables error logs
-u, --unbacked_list_disabled
	disable unbacked-up list

Contributor(s)

Luca Parolari <[email protected]>