Welcome! This is Rabak, a backup tool


What's Rabak?
=============

Rabak is a reliable rsync based backup system, simple to configure,
simple to run, simple to restore data with.

Rabak's strategy is to always make full backups, usually to one or more
attached external hard drives. Using rsync's clever hard linking abilities,
the resulting backups use up little target space. Rabak uses simple and
flexible configuration files and supports backup to or from remote machines.
It even supports remote to remote backup (think remote control).

Rabak is very good for unattended safe remote backups, and has support
for postgresql and mysql backups via database dump streaming.

It's simple to configure different, multiple sources for one backup set.
There's support for file filters that hide the complexity of the rsync filters
(and make them actually usable).


Requirements
============

You need Linux or Cygwin (Notice: On Cygwin pathes may not exceed 260 characters). Other plattforms may work too. We didn't try.

You need rsync. I know rabak doesn't work before version 2.6.4. Maybe even a newer one is required. The newer the better.

You need Perl, I don't know which version. Probably >= 5.8

You need the Mail::Send, Data::UUID, Getopt::Long(>= 2.36), and IPC::Run perl modules. Fetch it from CPAN:
cpan -i Mail::Send (or cpan -i MailTools)
cpan -i IPC::Run
cpan -i Getopt::Long
cpan -i Data::UUID

To use dupmerge, you will need the Digest::SHA and DBD::SQLite perl modules. To install it do:
cpan -i Digest::SHA
cpan -i DBD::SQLite

For Debian:
  apt install libipc-run-perl libdata-uuid-perl libemail-sender-perl rsync


Installation
============

Extract the files in rabak's archive to a temporary directory and install Rabak's perl library.
cd rabak-<version>
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Now you may copy the rabak script itself into your execution path and sample config files to /etc.
cp -p bin/rabak /usr/local/bin/
mkdir /etc/rabak
cp -p etc/* /etc/rabak/


Quick Start
===========

Look at rabak's help:
rabak help

Make a test backup:
rabak backup -c examples/rabak.simple.cf example

Have a look at the result:
ls -lA examples/example-backup/rabak/

Read the documentation:
rabak doc | more

Configure Rabak:
cp /etc/rabak/rabak.sample.cf /etc/rabak/rabak.cf
nano -w /etc/rabak/rabak.cf


Feature Tests
=============

If you have the right to run mount and mknod, you can test more features by doing:
sh ./stuff/sample-env-make

This produces a test environment in /tmp/rabak-sample-data. Data will be backed up
into /tmp/rabak-sample-backup. You can run the sample configurations provided in
rabak.sample.cf:

rabak -c rabak.sample.cf backup sample_firstof
rabak -c rabak.sample.cf -i Tue backup sample_targetgroup
rabak -c rabak.sample.cf -i Tue2 backup sample_targetgroup

When you're done, you can remove the test environment:
sh ./stuff/sample-env-remove

Check out the docs and the *.cf files for more insight. 

Further reading
===============

Documentation is available through rabak itself:
./rabak doc

The home page is http://www.raisin.de/rabak


Developers
==========
You can extend Rabak and add backup types. Have a look into
the Rabak/Type directory.


Have fun!
Stephan Hantigk rabak@steppicrew.de (Main developer)
Dietrich Raisin info1@raisin.de (Initial developer) 


License
=======

See the LICENSE file.