[Chicken-users] Ugarit: A backup/archival system

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

I'm pleased to announce the release of the first beta release of
Ugarit, a backup/archival system based around content-addressed
storage, written in Chicken Scheme.

This initial release supports archives stored in the filesystem,
including on remote servers via NFS and other such protocols. Future
versions plan support for storage of archives in S3 or on remote hosts
via SFTP/SSH, and a pluggable storage backend system allows for many
other forms of archive to be created.

Ugarit provides efficient snapshots and restores, without requiring
intelligence of its storage. Anything that works roughly like a
filesystem can be used as a Ugarit backend, and it is designed to
minimise the size of data sent to the archive, in order to reduce
transfer and storage costs on services like S3, and snapshot time.

I've tested it on various test filesystems, ranging from a contrived
example with all sorts of funny things like FIFOs and devices in, up
to 500MB of /usr/pkgsrc and >2GB of /usr. I'm going to see if I can
borrow some big hardware off of work to test it on some many-tens-of-
gigabytes filesystems as well, to see if I can find any scaling
issues. However, this is still beta software, so please be careful and
test your backups!

For details and installation instructions, see the project page at:

http://www.kitten-technologies.co.uk/project.php?project=ugarit

Future developments planned include:

* File modification time caching, reducing the time taken to identify
changed files to snapshot.
* Encrypted archives.
* Replicated archives, supporting both fault-tolerance over multiple
archives and local caching, where extractions are serviced from a
local archive, but if the local archive is lost (even just partially),
a remote archive can provide the missing data.
* More storage backends
* FUSE support, so you can browse your archive as a read-only filesystem

ABS

--
Alaric Snell-Pym
Work: http://www.snell-systems.co.uk/
Play: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
Blog: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/?author=4