April 5, 1999: Rev 0.60 VERY stable version. Cleaned up a whole mess of problems. I was mixing my paradigm betwen sysopen type operations and open type operations, which was causing some very subtle bugs. Also, I was assuming that perls write function was the opposite of its read function... no such luck. Cleaned up these problems and my blocking problems also went away, so defaults are now set back for reasonable efficiency. Perl's greatest asset (you just type what you want and it does it) is also it's greatest liability (when you are doing something you think you want but you shouldnt really want, Perl will just do it anyway instead of complaining about being asked to do nonsense).
April 5, 1999: Rev 0.51 No blocking factors besides 512 work, I am not sure why, I am looking into it. In the mean time, I changed all blocking factors to 512. This hurts performance, but increases reliability.
April 4, 1999: Rev 0.5, Initial beta release.
At the highest level, backburner is a collection of PERL scripts that leverage existing parts of the Unix system and allow users to backup and restore verified and compressed images of any mountable file-system, network drive, or even a disk partition. This should allow even unrecognized operating system partitions to be ghosted and restored via your Unix system, and allow recognized file-systems to be backed up and restored in whole or in parts.
These backups can be done with virtually any Unix supported media. Existing wrappers support floppy disks for the poor but brave, and CD-Recordable and CD-ReWritable disks for the rest of us. Also, a wrapper for any mountable media allows the use of Zip disks, NFS mounts, or any other accessible locations (including even FTP transfers). Extensions to support virtually any media are straightforward to create as simple modifications of the existing scripts.
For the experienced Unix programmer, BackBurner is a collection of tools that allow a Unix stream to be captured in stasis to any media, then reconstituted at a later date as a playback of an exact duplicate of the original stream. This capability, tied together with powerful stream oriented Unix utilities such as dd, tar and gzip allows tremendous functionality and flexibility.
BackBurner was written by Bill Kilgallon, killbill@one.net, in March of 1999. It is my second serious attempt at a PERL program, so be merciful in any critiques. I am sure there is a better way to do just about everything I did. Feel free to submit it to me, and I will likely incorporate it into any future versions.
Credits also go to my longtime friend and technical mentor, Jim Weirich. He is as patient as he is knowledgeable... every programmer should have a Jim at their disposal. Mark Grosser has also been a strong friend and mentor, and taught me discipline and tenacity as an engineer.
Backburner is currently a beta release. This is not so much due to a lack of stability of the software (it works great on my system), but due to it's young age, lack of easy customization, and lousy user interface. As others give me feedback as to functionality on other systems with other hardware, we will move towards a real release. Also, as people write graphical wrappers around backburners functionality, it will become much easier to use, and may become a full featured archive and restore package. If someone were to put an X-CD-Roast flavor wrapper around backburner, it could very easily become a full featured backup and restore package, easily rivaling many of the available Windows backup packages.
Here are Validation tests and their current status. I currently lack the disk space (or the nerve) to perform all the tests. As others verify their functionality, email me and I will update this page. My system is currently a dual booting AMD-K6-2 333 with the VIA chipset, 64 MB PC100 ram, Red Hat 5.2 Linux, and a Philips 3610 CD-Rewriter. I have the latest versions of cdrecord, but any reasonable version should work.
BackBurner is released according to the LGPL:
Copyright (C) 1999, Bill Kilgallon
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
Library General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the
Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
BackBurner requires PERL at a minimum, probably any version you have will work, I used pretty basic constructs.
Backburner generally works by creating a temporary image of the media to be created on a mounted file-system, then transfers that image to the target media . This means that if you wish to back up to CD-Recordable or CD-ReWritable disks (650 MB), you must have at least 650 MB free somewhere on your file system. This is a reflection of some of the warts left over as a result of inheriting a digital data specification from a digital audio specification. If you have a CD-Recorder or ReWriter, you probably know all about this already, and likely have a 650 MB scratch area somewhere that you use for disk images. Note that if the media can be mounted and written too directly, there is no need for a temporary image. The mountable device type does not use a temporary file.
If you want to write CD-Recordable or CD-Rewritable disks, you will need a suitable utility, such as cdrecorder (distributed as part of XCDRoast), to be able to fixate the image to disk. The current implementation of BackBurner requires cdrecorder, but you could substitute your own utility with very little work.
Getting a CD-Recorder/Rewriter to work with current Linux distributions is a non-trivial task. Set aside about 4 hours to get it done, read up on building new kernels, and gather the necessary information before you start. If there is an interest, I will try to post a summary of instructions here in the future. In reality the process is not that bad, but lack of a single up to date HOWTO makes it look pretty intimidating. The cdrecorder home page has the best information I have found yet on getting it wrorking.
If you have a LOT of time and patience, and not much money (or perhaps common sense), you might choose to use the floppy version of backburner. It will back up a typical 500 MB Linux system partition with about 200 floppies. Yes, this sounds dumb to me as well, but I remember building my own printer cable when I was in college because I had the $5 for the parts, but not $30 for the cable. Now you know what to do with all those AOL floppy disks everybody kept giving you. This also might be the only reasonable approach to getting some ancient laptops functional as well, you could build a functional partition up on your main system that is small enough to fit your laptop drive, and use this utility to transfer the image or file-system. If anyone tries this, let me know if it works, I gave away my last 386 Linux laptop a while back.
Well, for now just download the perl scripts, make any necessary changes for your device files (mainly in the bbcapture scripts, the location is obvious), and copy the files to an appropriate (/usr/local/bin) directory.
The section of bbcapture that you may need to change is pretty intuitive. Any changes should (hopefully) be pretty obvious. In future (non-beta) versions of the software, this will be driven from a configuration file. The existing sample setup should work for most users, as long as your CD-Recorder or CD-ReWriter is the first SCSI (or SCSI emulation) device in your system. The floppy version (though why you would want to use it is beyond me) should work for anyone who has a 3.5" high density floppy as the first floppy drive on their system.
At it's heart, backburner is simply a collection of utilities that captures and restores Unix data streams to a variety of media. This probably means little to the Unix newbe, but means just about everything to anyone experienced in the Unix paradigm.
If you are a Unix newbe, welcome. The learning curve is pretty steep, but the result is very powerful, stick with it. Here is a crash course in streams to help just a little.
Use the dd command for converting between disk
partitions and streams. For example, to back up the first partition
on the first hard drive to a CD-Rewriter, use the following command:
dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip | bbcapture --tempfile
/mnt/bigdisk/tempburn/backup.tmp --device cdrw --attended
To later extract this archive back to the same disk, you would use the command:
bbextract --device cdrw | gunzip | dd of=/dev/hda1
In both cases, the meaning of the arguments is as follows:
--attended is set, the user is prompted before any
writes to media are attempted, including the initial write. If the
flag is not set, the first write attempt and all retries (in the event
of verification failure) are performed without waiting for media
change or insertion (whenever possible).
Use the tar command for converting between mounted
file-systems and streams. For example, to back up the current root
file-system to a CD-Recorder, use the following command:
tar -clvzf - / | bbcapture --tempfile
/mnt/bigdisk/tempburn/backup.tmp --device cdr --attended
To later extract this archive back to the same disk, you would use the command:
bbextract --device cdr | tar -zxvf -
The options are the same as in the previous section. You can use any tar flags you want, the specified ones are a sane example. For Unix newbes, here is a description of what the tar options mean to help just a little.
Well, backburner will capture and restore any stream, so it is none of my business what you do with it. If it can be a stream (which just about all of Unix can be), it can be captured and restored.
The dd command makes (with gzip) a compressed bit
for bit mirror image of a partition (commonly called ghosting a
drive). This is great for complete disaster recovery or mass
production of disk images. It would also be the only way to back up
partitions of other operating systems that cannot be mounted on your
Linux system (precious few systems, in my experience). It is a strong
tool, but a blunt instrument. It can only restore the captured image,
individual files can not be extracted.
The tar command is probably a better solution for
any mountable file system, as it can selectively back up and restore
particular files or hierarchies to or from selectable locations.
Heck, tar was written for exactly this sort of thing. It has tons of
options for managing permissions, locations to read from, locations to
write from, archive searching, archive verification, including files,
excluding files, etc. If the file system can be mounted, it is
probably better to use tar.
Actually, this is the first release, so there have been no frequently asked questions, but here are the questions I would ask if I were you.
dd command, the gzip
command, the tar command, the crypt
command, and all the rest of the power of Unix, all without doing any
extra work. tar, gzip and dd may not
have a slick graphical user interface, but if you look at the total
functionality of the three working together (see the man page of each
for options), I can think of few commercial offerings that can rival
their combined functionality.
If you are looking to contribute to backburner, here is the list of things still to be done. Feel free to submit implementations for these items, or other suggestions to be incorporated into this list.