I am pleased to announce the release of Cedar Backup v2.0. This release has been more than a year in the works. During this time, the main focus was to clean up the codebase and the documentation, making the whole project easier to read, maintain, debug and enhance. Another major priority was validation, and the new implementation relies heavily on automated regression testing. Existing enhancement requests took a back seat to this cleanup effort, but are planned for future releases. The old v1.0 code tree will still be maintained for security support and major bug fixes, but all new development will take place on the v2.0 code tree. The new Debian package is called cedar-backup2 rather than cedar-backup. The old and new packages cannot be installed at the same time, but you can fall back to your existing cedar-backup package if you have problems with the new cedar-backup2 package. This should be considered a high-quality beta release. It has been through testing on my personal systems (all running various Debian releases), but could still harbour unknown bugs. If you have time, please report back to the cedar-backup-users mailing list about your experience with this new version, good or bad. WHAT IS CEDAR BACKUP? Cedar Backup is a Python package that supports secure backups of files on local and remote hosts to CD-R or CD-RW media. The package is focused around weekly backups to a single disc, with the expectation that the disc will be changed or overwritten at the beginning of each week. If your hardware is new enough, the script can write multisession discs, allowing you to add to a disc in a daily fashion. Directories are backed up using tar and may be compressed using gzip or bzip2. DOWNLOAD Information about how to download Cedar Backup can be found on the Cedar Solutions website: http://cedar-solutions.com/software/cedar-backup Cedar Solutions provides binary packages for Debian 'sarge' and 'woody'; and source packages for other Linux platforms. DOCUMENTATION The newly-rewritten Cedar Backup Software Manual can be found on the Cedar Solutions website: Single-page HTML: http://cedar-solutions.com/software/cedar-backup/manual/manual.html Multiple-page HTML: http://cedar-solutions.com/software/cedar-backup/manual/index.html Portable Document Format (PDF): http://cedar-solutions.com/software/cedar-backup/manual/manual.pdf Plaintext: http://cedar-solutions.com/software/cedar-backup/manual/manual.txt Most users will want to look at the multiple-page HTML version. Users who wish to print the software manual should use the PDF version. MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS IN THIS RELEASE The v2.0 release represents a ground-up rewrite of the Cedar Backup codebase using Python 2.3. The following is a partial list of major changes, enhancements and improvements: - Code is better structured, with a sensible mix of classes and functions. - Documentation has been completely rewritten from scratch in DocBook Lite. - Unicode filenames are now natively supported without Python site changes. - The runtime 'validate' action now checks for many more config problems. - There are no longer any restrictions related to backups spanning midnite. - Most lower-level code is intended to be general-purpose "library" code. - Configuration is standardized in a common class, so 3rd parties can use it. - Collect and stage configuration now support various additional options. - Package now supports 3rd-party backup actions via an extension mechanism. - Most library code is thoroughly tested via pyunit (1700+ individual tests). - Code structure allows for easy addition of other backup types (i.e. DVD). - Code now uses Python's integrated logging module, resulting in realtime logs. - Collect action uses Python's tar module rather than shelling out to GNU tar. - Internal use of pipes should now be more robust and less prone to problems. USER-VISIBLE CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE Cedar Backup v2.0 requires Python 2.3 or better. Cedar Backup v1.0 only required Python 2.2. Cedar Backup configuration files that were valid for the v1.0 release should still be valid for the v2.0 release, with one exception: the tarz (.tar.Z) backup format is no longer supported. This because the Python tar module does not support this format. If there is sufficient interest, this backup format could be added again via shelling to an external compress program. The Cedar Backup command-line interface has changed slightly, but the changes should not present a problem for most users. In Cedar Backup v1.0, backup actions (collect, stage, store, purge) were specified on the command line with switches, i.e. --collect. This is not considered a good practice, so v2.0 instead accepts actions as plain arguments specified after all switches. For instance, the v1.0 command "cback --full --collect" is coverted to "cback --full collect" in v2.0. -- Kenneth J. Pronovici <kenneth.pronovici@cedar-solutions.com> Cedar Solutions Software http://www.cedar-solutions.com/
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