backup2l

low-maintenance backup/restore tool

backup2l [backup-too-l] is a tool for autonomously generating, maintaining and restoring backups on a mountable file system (e. g. hard disk). In a default installation, backups are created regularly by a cron script. The main design goals are low maintenance effort, efficiency, transparency and robustness. All control files are stored together with the archives on the backup device, and their contents are mostly self-explaining. Hence, a user can - if necessary - browse the files and extract archives manually. backup2l features differential backups at multiple hierarchical levels. This allows one to generate small incremental backups at short intervals while at the same time, the total number of archives only increases logarithmically with the number of backups since the last full backup. An open driver architecture allows one to use virtually any archiving program as a backend. Built-in drivers support .tar.gz, .tar.bz2 and others. Further user-defined drivers can be added. An integrated split-and-collect function allows one to comfortably transfer all or selected archives to a set of CDs or other removable media.