Frontdown is an open source hardlink backup tool/script under the GPLv3 license. It is written in Python 3.5.
At the moment it is only usable on Windows, but should be able to be ported to Linux/Mac with not much effort, if anyone is interested in doing this.
It's inception arose out of the lack of good open source backup solutions that meet the following requirements:
- No proprietary container/archive format - because you want to use the tools you already have and know how to use to browse and operate on your backups.
- Versioning, but not full snapshots everytime - preferably backups using hardlinks
- Generate a report inbetween, so that I have a chance to review any operation on the file system before it occurs.
- Be versatile - don't just have one mode of operation and make me use multiple backup tools
- Just do the backup - No background service for fancy scheduling and automation throughout, but just a program that backups my stuff when I want it to and is relatively easy to use
I also wanted it to handle opened/locked files using Volume Shadow Copy (VSS), but since I myself don't have too much need for it, I did not look into it yet.
I'm aware that you have to be at least minimally tech-savvy to use Frontdown, since you have to edit your configuration files yourself and start it on the command line using Python and even though I am already using it for my personal backups, I still suspect some bugs lingering because of non-real world and inbred testing, so that I would doubly advice to be a little knowledgable about Python and computers before using it.
backup.py, the main program takes only one argument, a JSON configuration file. An example of such a configuration file, that also includes the default values and should therefore not be edited you can see in default.config.json. It also includes some comments on all the possible values, so that you should definitely have a proper look at it.
A more thorough documentation will be worked on as soon as a single soul on this planet shows interest in using this program.
If you have any questions, feedback, feature requests, fixes or contributions of any kind, feel free to write me a mail (apart from using the issue tracker or sending a pull request of course): joelschum@gmail.com. Any contributions are much appreciated!