Home User Backup Beta version available for testing from universe.

[Sivan Green]

Hello all,

 As some of you might have noticed, I have been working on [1] for the
last couple of months. What was thought to be something that's going to
be quick to complete and release, turned out to be a little bit more
difficult and challanging then I had originally expected. 

 During the first cycle of development I have bumped into intersting
problems, some of which were controlling subprocesses neatly from python
- while still wrapped by an interface for client frontends that would
protect them from all the gory details using co-routines, thinking up a
simple and concise backup approach for users to follow and understand
(thanks for Kinnison for his help ont this), and building something that
would allow me to replace the underlying implementation easily with none
or very few changes to the already existing front end infrastructure.

 The result of this first iteration of development is now available by
installing 'hubackup'[2] from universe. I would like to ask anybody who
is interested in this to give it a try, reports bugs against the product
in LP and let me know if for some reason this does not fit his needs so
I can see where more improvements can be done. I'd also like to
ecnourage people who are keen to help or interested in development, to
take part and send patches if they see fit.

 I would like to get as much testing as I can, then start massive bug
fixing. bringing this product to better quality. After having a well
tested and proven code base, I would then see further to improving this
solution in the following ways:

1) Use native python bindings at the BackupEngine.py level.
2) Trap all erros, and respond accordignly. Offer retired where
applicable.
3) Implement desktop notification support, as was intended for usage in
[1].
4) Add support for complete disaster recovery system, from a
partitionless system to a backed up snapshto up and running.

This is are the high level goals. A detailed HomeUserBackupNG
specification will follow. I'd welcome any comments, feedback and
suggestions! (as well as treating some of the untreated already
available in the old HomeUserBackup wiki page)

Cheers, and thanks in advance.

Sivan

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HomeUserBackup
[2]: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+source/hubackup