Is there a possebility to test linux client?

general discussion
1

Hello,

first of all, wow this is one of the most amazing things i seen for long time :-D

I would like to help testing linux client. Is this possible?

best regards

Jörg

2

There currently is no linux version sorry. There are some reasons for that:

  1. There would have to be a lot of different packages for different distributions. If somebody helps me with that it would be okay.
  2. The Linux clients wouldn’t have the same features. Linux has no shadow copies (would have to use lvm snapshotting(or btrfs) which only works if you installed everything on lvm). So e.g. database files wouldn’t be in a crash consistent state if you back them up. Image backups would be very difficult as well. Linux file system change notification support is still very new and last time I checked missed some features needed like recursive watches(I can’t find enough information about that anyways).
  3. If you have linux you can already use rsnapshot, backuppc, … which if UrBackup cannot do image backups sand does not use file system change notifications has the same feature sets as UrBackup.

That said it would not be difficult to create a linux version of the client. All code uses platform independent libraries. But for the time being I suggest you use backuppc as linux backup server. With enough interest or help an UrBackup client for linux (with less features) would be an option.

3

Hello, thank you for your response :-)

i´m interessed in help for a linux client. also i had a lott of experience with different linux distribution.
but i´m not a programmer.

as additional information…
regarding the lvm thing. i found a programm that does “snapshot” of a normal ext3 file system. This snapshot is attached t o a virtual device.
Please have a look at: http://www.r1soft.com/tools/linux-hot-copy/

I don´t now what kind of mechanism they use, but it works very well.

so what could a linux client with less feature do?
I think there could be a possebilty to do a normal “tar” based file system backup including “mbr” and “partition info”. For bypass the database issue it could be an option to include a pre and post backup option? So the user is responsible to get his system in a known state, before starting the backup.
For a restore create the partition as described in the part.info file that is included in the backup, recover mbr and untar the file content to the “/” parttion.

finaly do things with chroot and grub-install …

I know that this is not same way as the solution that windows could provide… but maybe a workaround to have a possebility to create workstation images without having lvm installed …?..

if you would like me to test some things … i´ll be very glad to do this … because i like this handy tool … :-)