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NAME

       faubackup - Backup System using a Filesystem for Storage

SYNOPSIS

       faubackup-gather [-v|--verbose] [--atime-preserve
       faubackup-scatter [-v|--verbose]

DESCRIPTION

       faubackup-gather,  faubackup-scatter  uses a filesystem on a hard drive
       for incremental and full  backups.   This  enables  the  backup  to  be
       accessable through standard filesystem tools.

       Later Backups to the same filesystem will automatically be incremental,
       as unchanged files are only hard-linked with the  existing  version  of
       the file.

       faubackup-gather reads a NUL-delimited list of filenames from stdin and
       serializes the contents of these files to stdout in a  special  format,
       containing  all inode informations.  All Error messages or other output
       are written to stderr.  To backup the current  directory  you  can  use
       ’faubackup-find  | faubackup-gather’.  To be able to correctly read all
       files, faubackup-gather should be run as the superuser.

       faubackup-scatter will read contents of  directories  from  stdin,  and
       recreate   all   files.    stdin   must   be  in  the  format  used  by
       faubackup-gather.  It first creates a directory for  current  date  and
       time  inside  the  current  directory  (e.g.  ’./2001-02-07@03:20:10’).
       Everything written will go into this directory or subdirectories.

       Everything read by faubackup-gather will be recreated with exactly  the
       same  names,  contents, permissions and times (with one exeption: inode
       change time will be the time of the backup).  Thus, these two  programs
       are  capable  of  backing  up  directories  just  like  cpio  and  tar.
       faubackup-scatter can  deal  with  holes  in  files.   To  be  able  to
       correctly  set  all permissions, faubackup-scatter should be run as the
       superuser.

       faubackup-scatter will detect if there are other backups  to  the  same
       destination  directory (with only differing timestamps).  In this case,
       files that haven’t changed since the last backups will not  be  written
       to  the  filesystem,  but  instead  hard-linked  against  the  previous
       version.  Thus, diskspace is only needed for the directory  inodes  and
       for changed files.

       To  be  able  to  hard-link  files,  faubackup-scatter  will  create an
       additional directory, ..inodes, which contains all files,  named  after
       their  inode  (this is: device/inode of the source).  These entries are
       hardlinked to the actual location where they are stored in the  backup.

       To  be  able to detect a broken transmission, a special entry (".")  is
       used as an end-of-backup marker.  If the connection between the  gather
       and  scatter programs suddenly breaks (e.g. because of network outage),
       faubackup-scatter will detect the missing end-of-backup marker and will
       mark the backup as broken.  To make that system work, the filelist feed
       into faubackup-gather has to end with a single dot.  But that is a good
       idea anyway, as it ensures that access rights for the root directory of
       the backup are set correctly.  "faubackup-find already  generates  this
       marker automatically.

       If  you  want  to  remove  an  old  backup, simply delete the directory
       created by faubackup-scatter (the one  named  after  the  backup-time).
       When  the  same version of a file is needed by an other backup, it will
       still remain on the disk.

OPTIONS

       -v --verbose
              Show  verbose  output.   This  includes  all   filenames   being
              read/written.

       --atime-preserve
              Try to reset the access time to its previous value after reading
              a file which is to be backed  up.   Doing  so  will  update  the
              ctime, too.  Don’t use this option if you are using other backup
              software in parallel, because it might think that all your files
              have changed.

FORMAT

       The  format used by these tools includes the filenames, device numbers,
       inode-numbers, inode-contents and file contents  of  all  inodes  in  a
       binary format.

       The exact format is subject to change.  Look at the source for details.

BUGS

       Please report all bugs to faubackup-user@lists.sourceforge.net.

SEE ALSO

       faubackup(8),  faubackup-find(8),  cpio(1),  tar(1),  find(1),   ls(1),
       grep(1).

COPYRIGHT

       FauBackup is Copyright (c) 2000-01 Dr. Volkmar Sieh, (c) 2000-06 Martin
       Waitz.  Developed at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

       FauBackup  comes  with  ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software;
       you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the  terms  of  the  GNU
       General  Public  License  as published by the Free Software Foundation;
       either version 2, or (at your  option)  any  later  version.   Look  at
       COPYING for details.

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Martin Waitz <tali@admingilde.org>

CONTACT

       mailto:faubackup-user@lists.sourceforge.net

                                 June 23, 2003                    FAUBACKUP(8)