Backing up is easy to do with Areca

Today I am sitting at home waiting, hoping to hear from several people hoping waiting for a job to come so that I can have some income to go with the outgo this weekend. In that vein how about your income and outgo, do you create content, generate files, or just plain help other people, then you need a very nice backup utility. Here is a free as in beer GPL 2 java application that can perform that job very nicely. What is even better this application has a command line interface, so you can use the Windows(TM) scheduler or acron, or cron, or some other scheduler to run it automagically. There is no required user intervention except at the beginning, to use the GUI to setup the installation files that provide your selections and desires. These files are XML, so if you are hard core you can edit them directly with your favorite XML editor, I just use notepad to make small tweaks.

Areca is located here.

A small list of features is:

• Archives content explorer
• Archive description : A manifest is associated to each archive, which contains various informations such as author, title, date, description, and some technical data.
• File history explorer : Areca keeps track of your file’s history (creation / modifications / deletion) over your archives.
• Backup simulation : useful to check wether a backup is necessary
• User’s actions history : Areca keeps an history of all user’s actions (archives deletion, merges, backups, recoveries).
• Archive’s indicators : Areca computes a lot of indicators for you, which will help you in the everyday management of your archives.
• Backup reports : Areca generates backup reports that can be stored on your disk or send by email.
• Post backup scripts : Areca can launch shell scripts after backup.

• Archives compression (Zip format)
• Archives encryption (Triple DES & AES encryption algorithm)
• Source file filters (by extension, subdirectory, regular expression, size, date, status, usage)
• Incremental / Full backup support
• Archives merges / deletion : You can merge contiguous archives in one single archive or safely delete your latest archives.
• As of date recovery : Areca allows you to recover your archives (or single files) as of a specific date.
• Transaction mechanism : All critical processes (such as backups or merges) support a transaction mechanism (with commit / rollback management) which guarantees your backups’ integrity.

These features are all copied from the website, and I don’t use even a part of the functionality.

When I used to work for lean and mean small company, before I was layed off, let go, downsized. Every Saturday a complete backup was written to a zip and then put on a DVD-R. Every day at 7:00 pm all changed files are written to a zip, and the zip file copied to a another file server. For my personal systems at home I just use a 250 GB Maxtor One Touch Backup with this same setup except that every Zip is copied to the Maxtor FireWire External Drive. I do not use the OneTouch Software, because it insists that the software must sit in the toolbar, and uses some valuable CPU cycles just sitting there, especially when Windows XP keeps insisting that this toll is not being used and bothers me with those comic balloons.

If you have a tape backup system, you will have to carefully evaluate wether this is a good setup for you or not, since copying Files to Tape seems to take a specialized program. I learned along time ago that I will never be involved in systems that contain more than a DVD’s 4.7 Gigabyte of data.

Areca Web Site

[tags]microface, Open Source, Backup[/tags]