Adump backup suite

This is the homepage for the Adump backup suite.

This project is hosted on

It may be useful to look at the Sourceforge project hompage.

Release

• Version 1.0 was released 2001 Aug 05.

Docs

The Adump Documentation (what there is of it) is on a separate page.

Adump 1.2 Goals

I've established some goals for the 1.2 release.

Goals

The following are some of the goals for this project.

• Perform full backups and incremental/differential backups using different available strategies. Very few backup solutions really support incremental backups well.
• Support multiple active backup sets, for example, to allow media rotation, and offsite storage.
• Support various types of backup media: tapes, removable disks (zip, MO, DVD-RAM), eventually CD-R in packet mode.
• Backup by FTP.
• Client/server backups, either push or pull.
• Maintain online catalogs of backups for quick restore.
• Perform backup verification if desired.
• Packages for Debian, and Redhat (and others?).
• Simultaneous backup to multiple media. This has been asked for, and isn't all that hard to do.

What's done so far (most recent first)

2002/02/09

GNAT 3.14p has been released. This release contains a socket implementation that is portable across all platforms (except VMS) that are supported by GNAT. Implementing my client/server using a socket interface seems to be a better approach than trying to get glade to fit my model.

I've also checked in the current development code into the sourceforge CVS tree. Although I'm doing the development in Aegis, I'll try to mirror this occasionally to the CVS tree. Aegis also supports distributed development, but it is a very different model. I'll probably try to make this data available somewhere as well.

2001/09/29

I created a bit of rambling about Incremental backups.

2001/08/05

Version 1.0 has been released.

2000/11/10

I have been using the code to backup my machine regularly. It supports multiple sets of independent backups (provided each backup set fits on a single piece of media). There is a media manager for tape devices. I have some ideas of maintaining the online catalog without adding too much space to the existing database.

There was some interest from Onstream about writing a single backup set to multiple tape drives (kind of like striping). This wouldn't be all that hard to do.

In a couple of months I should have better net access, and will feel better about putting the code on my page.

2000/09/15

I have much of the backup engine developed. All of the code is in place to perform full and incremental backups. I'm currently developing the media manager.

Where's the code

Take a look at Version 1.0.

I'm developing this software using Aegis. I've decided it would be better of me to publish a tar snapshot of the code, and provide an Aegis web interface to my current repository. That way, anyone who wants to work on the code can just submit change sets back to me. It would be most helpful for me for anyone wishing to help to at least give Aegis a try. It has a very nice software development model.

If you offer to help, I can work with you to get the system up.

Wait a second, this doesn't look like C to me

It isn't. Adump is written entirely in Ada. There is a small C program run during the build to extract system-dependent information from header files and generates an Ada package. Pre-existing libraries are not going to be re-written (that would be silly), but Ada is very good at interfacing to other languages.

Why did I do this? Quite frankly, it is because Ada is a much better programming language than C or C++. Most users will install package files, and never know the difference. The code will compile nicely using the freely available Gnu Ada Compiler. For more information, have a look at the Ada for Linux project.

This page last modified 2002/02/28.