Changes To rsbackup

Please see rsbackup in git for detailed change history.

Changes In rsbackup 5.1

• Store directories are now normally required to be mount points. See the description of store and store-pattern in rsbackup(5) and --unmounted-store in rsbackup(1) for options to restore the previous behavior. Fixes issue #42.
• Minor build fixes.

Changes In rsbackup 5.0

• Incompatible change: Configuration file parsing has changed slightly, with stricter rules about indentation. See rsbackup(5) for details.
• Incompatible change: The default location for snapshots has changed to /var/lib/rsbackup/snapshots. Fixes issue #28. If you use snapshots you must adjust your configuration.
• New host-check directive controlling how to test whether hosts are up or down. Fixes issue #26.
  Advance warning: the old always-up directive is now deprecated and will produce a warning. In some future version it will be removed.
• ACLs and extended attributes are now backed up. Note that the options used assume a modern version of rsync, and are not supported by the version installed under macOS; also this feature can also cause some trouble with Windows filesystems. Set the rsync-extra-options as discussed in rsbackup(5) to work around this. Fixes issue #37 and issue #41.
• The --retire option now always requests confirmation from the user. Fixes issue #38.
• New --forget-only option used with --retire to drop database records for backups without deleting the backups themselves. Fixes issue #41.
• pre-backup-hook scripts may now exit with a distinct exit status to indicate a transient failure, equivalent to a check-file or check-mounted test failing. Addresses issue #43.

Changes In rsbackup 4.0

• A new tool, rsbackup-graph, has been introduced. This generates a graphical representation of available backups.
• The colors directive is now split into colors-good and colors-bad which can take either RGB or HSV parameters.
  Advance warning: the old colors directive is now deprecated and will produce a warning. In some future version it will be removed.
• Report contents can now be parameterized using the new report directive.
  Advance warning: the old report-prune-logs directive is now deprecated and will produce a warning. In some future version it will be removed.
• Configuration file documentation has been moved to a new man page, rsbackup(5).
• Various minor bugs have been fixed.

Changes In rsbackup 3.1

• Don’t throw exceptions from destructors. Addresses Debian bug #811705.
• Fix error handling in character encoding translation.
• Patch from Maria Valentina Marin to use consistent mtimes during .deb build. Fixes Debian bug #793716.
• Stop cron scripts exiting nonzero if .deb is removed. Fixes Debian bug #810335.
• Patch from Jonathon Wiltshire to use install rather than cp during .deb builds.
• Correct distribution of scripts.
• Add missing .deb build dependencies.

Changes In rsbackup 3.0

• Pruning now supports selectable, and pluggable, pruning policies. See the PRUNING section of the man page for further information. The default behavior matches previous versions. Fixes issue #7.
  Advance warning: the min-backups and prune-age directives are now deprecated in their current form and will produce a warning. In some future version they will be removed. Instead, use prune-parameter min-backups and prune-parameter prune-age.
• Advance warning: the public, always-up, check-mounted and traverse directives now take an explicit boolean argument. Using them without an argument is now deprecated (but has not changed in meaning). In some future version the argument will become mandatory.
• Removal of backups (when pruning, or retiring a volume) now parallelizes removal across devices. Fixes issue #24.
• The rsync-timeout and hook-timeout directives are now inherited, as documented. ssh-timeout becomes inherited too. The sendmail directive is now documented.
• Host and volume names may no longer start with “-”.
• --dump-config --verbose now annotates its output. Some options missed by --dump-config are now output.
• A C++11 compiler and Boost are now required.

Changes In rsbackup 2.1

• rsbackup.cron will always run the prune and report steps, even if the earlier steps fail.
• rsbackup-snapshot-hook copes better with aliases for logical volumes. Fixes issue #23.
• Pruning logs in the report are now limited by the report-prune-logs configuration setting.

Changes In rsbackup 2.0

• Incompatible change: pre-backup and post-backup hooks are now run even in --dry-run mode. The environment variables RSBACKUP_ACT can be used by the script to distinguish the two situations. rsbackup-snapshot-hook has been modified accordingly. Fixes issue #9.
• Incompatible change: The log format has changed. The old per-backup logfiles are gone, replaced by a SQLite database. Old installations are automatically upgraded. Fixes issue #11.
• New check-mounted option verifies that a volume is mounted before backing it up. Fixes issue #13.
• New store-pattern option allows stores to be specified by a glob pattern instead of individually. Fixes issue #5.
• New stylesheet and colors options allow operator control of the stylesheet and coloration in the HTML version of the report. Fixes issue #6.
• The semantics of lock are now documented. Fixes issue #20.
• Shell scripts supplied with rsbackup no longer depend on Bash.
• Dashes are now allowed in hostnames. Fixes issue #21.
• The order in which hosts are backed up can now be controlled with the priority option. Fixes issue #19.
• Reports now include counts of various error/warning conditions in the summary section; email reports reflect these in the subject line. The always-up option is slightly modified: backups of always-up hosts are attempted, resulting in error logs, even if they do not seem to be available. Fixes issue #22.
• New --database option allows the path to the database to be overridden.

Changes In rsbackup 1.2

• Quoting and completeness fixes to --dump-config option.
• OSX builds work again.
• The cron scripts no longer attempt to run rsbackup.cron when it has been removed. Fixes Debian bug #766455.
• Some fixes to Debian packaging.

Changes In rsbackup 1.1

• Error messages about missing unavailable devices with --store are now more accurate. Fixes issue #10.
• The include command now skips filenames that start with #. Fixes issue #12.
• The command-line parser now rejects invalid host and volume names (rather than accepting ones that will never match anything). Zero-length device, host and volume names are now rejected (in all contexts).
• The test suite has been expanded, and supports concurrent execution if a sufficiently recent version of Automake is used. Fixes issue #14.
• rsbackup-snapshot-hook no longer fails if fsck finds and fixes errors. It is also now tested. Fixes issue #15.

Changes In rsbackup 1.0

• New --dump-config option to verify configuration file parse.
• New --check option to rsbackup-mount.
• Configuration files are now read in a fixed order (issue #8).
• The --force option no longer implies the --verbose option. (This was a bug.)
• Minor bug fixes.

Changes In rsbackup 0.4.4

• Correct RSBACKUP_STATUS value passed to post-backup hook. (Bug spotted by Jacob Nevins.)

Changes In rsbackup 0.4.2

• --retire no longer fails if a host directory has already been removed.
• Fixed recalculation of per-device backup counts, visible as self-inconsistent reports when generated in the same invocation of rsbackup as some other operation.

Changes In rsbackup 0.4.1

• Fix a crash with the --html option (Jon Amery).
• Fix to --prune-incomplete option, which wouldn't work in the absence of some other option (Jacob Nevins).

Changes In rsbackup 0.4

• The new pre-access-hook and post-access-hook options support running “hook” scripts before and after any access to backup storage devices.
• The new pre-backup-hook and post-backup-hook options support running “hook” scripts before and after a backup. Although these can be used for any purpose, the motivation is to enable the creation of LVM snapshots of the subject filesystems (and their destruction afterwards), resulting in more consistent backups. The supplied hook script only knows about the Linux logical volume system.
• The new devices option allows a host or volume to be restricted to a subset of devices, identified by a filename glob pattern.
• The new rsync-timeout option allows a time limit to be imposed on a backup.
• The new check-file option allows backups of a volume to be suppressed when it is not available (for instance, because it is only sometimes mounted).
• --verbose (and therefore --dry-run) is now more verbose.
• --text and --html now accept - to write to standard output.
• Improved error reporting.
• Minor bug fixes and portability and build script improvements.
• rsbackup-mount now supports unencrypted devices and separate key material files (contributed by Matthew Vernon).

Changes In rsbackup 0.3

• --prune honours command-line selections again.
• The “oldest” backup for a host with no backups now shows up as “none” rather than “1980-01-01”.
• The new --logs option controls which logfiles are included in the HTML report. The default is to only include the logfile of the most recent backup if it failed. Also, if the most recent attempt to backup a volume to a given device failed, its heading is highlighted (in red).
• The tool scripts now have proper --version options. Single-letter command line options are now supported (in fact they existed in many cases already but weren’t documented).
• Retiring a volume no longer makes a (futile and harmless!) attempt to remove . and ...
• The .incomplete files used by the Perl script to indicate partial backups are now created by the C++ version too. They are created both before starting a backup and before pruning it. rsbackup itself does not rely on them itself but they are an important hint to the operator when doing bulk restores.
• Logfiles of backups where pruning has commenced are now updated to reflect this, so that they will not be counted as viable backups in the report.
• Error output from failed backups is now more visible. The old behaviour can be restored with the --no-errors option.
• Missing or misconfigured stores are now reported in more detail. If it looks like a store is present but misconfigured (for instance, wrong permissions), this is always reported as an error. If it looks like the store is absent then this is only reported if --warn-store is given, but if no configured store is present then the problems found with all configured stores are listed. The documentation on how to set up stores has also been clarified.
• Prune logs now include detail about why a backup was eligible for pruning.

Changes In rsbackup 0.2

rsbackup has been rewritten in C++. The behaviour is largely same except as follows:

• New --text option generates a plaintext version of the report. In addition the email report includes both the text and HTML versions.
• --prune-unknown is removed. It is replaced by --retire, which is used to remove backups of volumes (and hosts) that are no longer in use and --retire-device which is used to remove logs for devices that are no longer in use.
• The rsync command now includes the --delete option, meaning that interrupted backups no longer include stray files from the first attempt.
• .incomplete files are no longer created. Instead the logs are used to distinguish complete from incomplete backups.
• Various --warn- options to control what is warned about.
• New always-up option to indicate that a host is expected to always be available to back up.
• There are now test scripts.