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“Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.”— Linus Torvalds, at the release of Linux 2.0.8 in July of 1996.
Cedar Backup is a Python package that supports backups of files on local and remote hosts to CD-R or CD-RW media over a secure network connection. Cedar Backup also includes extensions that understand how to back up MySQL databases and Subversion repositories, and it can be easily extended to support other data sources, as well.
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, Cedar Backup 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.
There are many different backup software implementations out there in the free and open-source software world. Cedar Backup aims to fill a niche: it aims to be a good fit for people who need to back up a limited amount of important data to CD-R or CD-RW on a regular basis. Cedar Backup isn't for you if you want to back up your MP3 collection every night, or if you want to back up a few hundred machines. However, if you administer a small set machines and you want to run daily incremental backups for things like system configuration, current email, small web sites, or a CVS repository, then Cedar Backup is probably worth your time.
Cedar Backup has been developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and is primarily supported on Debian and other Linux systems. However, since it is written in portable Python, it should run without problems on just about any UNIX-like operating system. In particular, full Cedar Backup functionality is known to work on Debian and SuSE Linux systems, and client functionality is also known to work on FreeBSD and Mac OS X systems.
To run a Cedar Backup client, you really just need a working Python installation. To run a Cedar Backup master, you will also need a set of other executables, most of which are related to building and writing CD images. A full list of dependencies is provided in the section called “Installing Dependencies”.