Obnam NEWS
==========
This file summarizes changes between releases of Obnam.
NOTE: Obnam has an **EXPERIMENTAL** repository format under
development, called `green-albatross-20160813`. It is **NOT** meant
for real use. It is likely to change in incompatible ways without
warning. DO NOT USE it unless you're willing to lose your backup.
Version 1.22+git, not yet released
----------------------------------
Version 1.22, released 2017-06-25
----------------------------------
* Lars Wirzenius made Obnam log the full text of an Obnam
exception/error message with more than one line. In particular this
applies to encryption error messages, which now log the gpg output.
* Lars Wirzenius made `obnam restore` require absolute paths for files
to be restored.
* Lars Wirzenius made `obnam forget` use a little less memory. The
amount depends on the number of genrations and the chunks they
refer to.
* Jan Niggemann updated the German translation of the Obnam manual to
match recent changes in the English version.
* SanskritFritz and Ian Cambell fixed the kdirstat plugin.
* Lars Wirzenius changed Obnam to hide a Python stack trace when
there's a problem with the SSH connection (e.g., failure to
authenticate, or existing connection breaks).
* Lars Wirzenius made the Green Albatross version of `obnam forget`
actually free chunks that are no longer used.
Version 1.21, released 2016-12-29
------------------------------------
* Disable bind-mount detection for `--one-filesystem`.
Version 1.20.3, released 2016-12-15
------------------------------------
* Disable running of yarn tests during a Debian package build. gpg
sometimes fails, and I have not been able to find out why.
Version 1.20.2, released 2016-10-30
------------------------------------
* Depend on gnupg instead of gpg.
Version 1.20.1, released 2016-10-30
----------------------------------
* Debian packaging change: add dependency on gpg.
Version 1.20, released 2016-10-29
---------------------------------
* The format name for `green-albatross` is renamed to
`green-albatross-20160813` and will henceforth be renamed every time
there's a change, to avoid confusing Lars because of backwards
incompatibilities. When it reaches stability and the on-disk format
is frozen, it'll be renamed back to a date-less version.
* Those using the experimental green-albatross repository format will
have to start over with fresh repositories. This release contains
backwards incompatible changes that mean existing repositories no
longer work. Sorry, but that's what experimental means.
* A green-albatross change is that the "chunk index" data structure is
no longer a single blob, and instead it's broken down into smaller
objects. This avoids keeping all of the chunk indexes in memory at
once, which should reduce memory use.
* Remi Rampin started updating and continuing the French translation
of the Obnam manual.
* Lars Wirzenius changed the default so that Obnam reads random data
when creating encryption key from `/dev/urandom` instead of
`/dev/random`. The goal is to make it less likely that Obnam stops
at the key generation stage on machines with little entropy. Set
`weak-random = no` in your configuration to override this.
Minor changes:
* Lars Wirzenius changed `obnam forget` so that if there is nothing to
do, it doesn't even try to connect to the repository.
* Lars Wirzenius added a chapter on participating in the Obnam project
to the manual.
* Lars Wirzenius changed `--one-file-system` to work for bind mounts.
It only works for bind mounts that exist at the time when Obnam
starts, however. Also, `/proc/mounts` must be an accurate list of
mount points.
* Lars Wirzenius added the gpg command line to the error message about
gpg failing.
Bug fixes:
* The manual and manual page used to claim you could break only the
locks for one client. This was not true. The manuals has been fixed.
* A whole bunch of typo fixes, from Andrea Gelmini.
* Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a bug in the FUSE (obnam mount) plugin,
which was a typo in a method name (`get_clientgeneration_ids`).
* Lars Wirzenius fixed `obnam restore` to require a target set with
`--to`. Jonathan Dowland reported the problem.
* Lars Wirzenius fixed `obnam list-errors` so that it doesn't crash on
error classes that only exist to make the exception hierarchy
neater, such as `EncryptionError`. Bug reported by Rik Theys.
* Ian Cambell fixed a bug in `obnam kdirstat` and its handling of FIFO
sockets.
Version 1.19.1, released 2016-01-30
---------------------------------
Bug fix:
* The check for paramiko version turned out not to work with
versions 1.7.8 through 1.10.4, due to the
`paramiko.__version_info__` variable being missing. It's there in
earlier and later versions. Lars Wirzenius added code to make the
check work if the `paramiko.__version__` variable is there. Jan
Niggemann provided research and testing.
Version 1.19, released 2016-01-15
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* Backup no longer ignores a closed SSH connection. This means it
won't keep trying to use it, forever. Instead, it crashes and
terminates the backup.
* The Paramiko SSH implementation, which Obnam uses, changed the
interface to the `prefetch` method in its 1.16 version. Obnam can
now deal with either variant of the method. Found and reported by
Kyle Manna, who provided a patch that Lars Wirzenius rewrote to be
backwards compatible to older versions of Paramiko.
Improvements to the manual:
* The manual now has an appendix listing all Obnam errors, with codes
and explanations. This will need to be updated manually from time to
time.
* The manual now has sections on turning on full debug logging and
reporting problems.
Improvements to functionality:
* The output of `obnam generations` now show time zone. Lars Wirzenius
implemented based on suggestion by Limdi.
Version 1.18.2, released 2015-11-15
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* The `--exclude-caches` option now works correctly again. Previously
it would exclude a cache directory, but would scan through and back
up the contents of the cache directory. As a result, the backup
generation would be much bigger, but have hidden files, not visible
in the output of `obnam ls`. To fix that, remove any generations
made with Obnam 1.18 or 1.18.1.
This will affect other exclusions as well.
Version 1.18.1, released 2015-11-06
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* The `--quiet` option now disables the statistics reports at the end
of a backup run.
Version 1.18, released 2015-11-04
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* William Boughton fixed parsing for sftp URLs with IPv6 addresses.
Previously, `sftp://[::1]` would be interpreted by Obnam as an
address `[` followed by the port `:1]`, but now it is correctly
interpreted as the address `::1` and no explicit port.
* Ian Campbell fixed a bug in the kdirstat plugin, improving the
handling of unknown file types.
* Lars Wirzenius changed the `scan_tree` code to not be recursive, to
avoid problems with directory trees that are deeper than Python's
call stack limit allows.
Minor changes:
* Lars Wirzenius added support for a multiline progress message during
backup. Version 0.24 or newer of `ttystatus` is needed for this, but
Obnam will work with an older version by displaying the same
single-line progress message as before.
* Ben Boeckel added the `--gnupghome` setting so that Obnam can be
configured to use a separate GnuPG (gpg) configuration directory.
* Henri Sivonen improved the compression code to not compress if the
result would be larger.
Version 1.17, released 2015-09-12
---------------------------------
* Lukáš Poláček added the `--fsck-skip-checksums` setting to
greatly speed up `obnam fsck`.
* Lars Wirzenius fixed a bug that caused Obnam to sometimes back up
the parent of the backup live data root. In other words, if running
`obnam backup $HOME/important`, then Obnam might backup the whole
of the home directory, instead of just the important subdirectory.
Version 1.16, released 2015-09-06
---------------------------------
* Fixed another typo in a variable name ("netloc"), found by Benedikt
Neuffer.
* Fixed a lot of missing module imports, unnecessary module imports,
and other minor bugs and style issues found by pylint. Pylint now
gets run automatically by the test suite.
This includes a fix in `exclude_pathnames_plugin.py` to add a missing
import and fix variable names, by Diane Trout. A similar fix was
also contributed by Mesar Hameed.
* Lukáš Poláček fixed an unlocking problem when GnuPG fails during an
Obnam run. The lock should now be removed rather than left behind.
Version 1.15, released 2015-08-19
---------------------------------
* Fixed a typo in a variable name ("netloc"), found by Dirk.
Version 1.14, released 2015-08-14
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* Since 1.9, Obnam has had trouble with sftp URLs for backup roots,
particularly for URLs specifying the server's root directory. Dennis
Jacobfeuerborn found the reason: the backup plugin was treating URLs
as filenames. This should now be fixed.
Version 1.13, released 2015-08-01
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* Lukáš Poláček found and fixed a repository corruption problem: if
`obnam forget` was interrupted at the wrong moment, it might remove
a chunk, but not the reference to it. This would case a future run
of `obnam forget` to crash due to a missing chunk (error code
R43272X). `obnam forget` will now ignore such a missing chunk, since
it would've deleted it anyway.
Lars Wirzenius then changed things so that chunk files are only
removed once references to the chunks have been committed.
Improvements:
* `obnam forget` now commits changes after each generation it has
removed. This means that if the operation is committed, less work is
lost. Suggested by Lukáš Poláček, re-implemented by Lars Wirzenius.
Version 1.12, released 2015-07-08
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* Steven Monai reported that using `--one-file-system` would crash,
and it turned out to be a missing import.
* Jan Niggemann reported that `--exclude-caches` no longer worked.
This was due to a bug introduced when the option was moved to its
own plugin (for cleaner code). The bug was masked by another bug, in
the Yarn test suite. Both bugs have now been fixed.
Improvements:
* Jan Niggemann translated the Obnam manpage to German. Due to cliapp
not supporting other languages than English yet, the manual page
lacks option descriptions.
Version 1.11, released 2015-07-02
---------------------------------
* The 1.10 release failed to correctly include the Green Albatross
code, due to a missing line in `setup.py`. This has been fixed.
Version 1.10, released 2015-07-01
---------------------------------
Major bug fixes:
* Lars Wirzenius fixed the `obnam backup` command to lock the whole
repository, the same way as `obnam forget` does, when it removes
checkpoint generations. This means that during checkpoint removal,
no other client can make a backup, which is unfortunate. To avoid
that, set `leave-checkpoints = yes` in the configuration. That will
prevent `obnam backup` from removing checkpoints.
Minor new features:
* Lars Wirzenius added the `obnam list-formats` command to list all
repository formats.
* The default value for the `upload-queue-size` setting is now 1024,
chosen based on some benchmarking made by Lars Wirzenius to balance
speed and memory use.
* An EXPERIMENTAL new repository format, `green-albatross`, as been
introduced. It is not ready for actual use, and is only added so
that its code doesn't diverge far from the main line of development.
* Teemu Hukkanen reported that the Synology NAS device returns EACCES
instead of ENOENT when user tries to remove a non-existent file.
Obnam now copes with either error code.
Minor fixes:
* `python setup.py build` no longer formats the manual page into plain
text. This is now done in `python setup.py docs` instead. The latter
is an optional build step, and probably only works on Debian.
* `obnam restore --to=DIR` now requires that the directory `DIR`
either doesn't exist, or it is empty when the restore starts. This
is to prevent users from restore on top of a running system.
Version 1.9, released 2015-03-22
--------------------------------
New features:
* James Vasile changed Obnam so it can backup an individual file,
instead of an entire directory.
* James Vasile added the `--include` option to Obnam, allowing one to
include files that would otherwise be excluded (see `--exclude`).
* Carlo Teubner changed `obnam fsck` to remove unused chunks, if the
`--fsck-fix` or `--fsck-rm-unused` settings are used. He also made
it not check for unused chunks when it's useless to do so, because
of various `--fsck-skip` settings are used.
* A start of a French translation of the manual by pedrito2.
* Ian Cambell provided a new Obnam command, `obnam kdirstat`, which
makes the KDE `k4dirstat` utility be able to show graphically which
parts of a backup generation use most space.
* Lars Wirzenius added the `simple` repository format, which is for
demonstration only. It is much too simplistic to be used for real.
Minor changes:
* The manual page and `obnam --help` are now clearer that the `--root`
setting and command line arguments to `obnam backup` can be SFTP
URLs. Thanks to Simone Piccardi for reporting the issue.
* David Fries filled in the displayed file permission mode bits.
* Grammar and typo fixes for the obnam.1 manual page, from Jean
Jordaan.
* Tom Chiverton suggested a clarification to the manual page for
"obnam mount" to say that each generation is a subdirectory.
* David Fries changed restore to set the group ownership if possible
even when not root. No warnings are issued if the attempt fails.
* Jan Niggemann added a little to the German translation of the Obnam
manual.
* Lars Wirzenius added the path to the error message about a missing
chunk (R43272X).
* Lars Wirzenius made the message at the end of a backup report more
statistics about transfers during the backup.
Bug fixes:
* The Obnam SFTP plugin would loop infinitely if it lost the
connection to the SSH server while creating a temporary file. Itamar
Turner-Trauring provided a fix for this.
* Will Dyson fixed a bug about locking while removing checkpoint
generations.
* Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a Python 2.6 compatibility problem in
the unit tests (use of `assertRaises` as a context manager).
* Lars Kruse fixed a bug with backing up of overlapping backup roots
(e.g., / and /boot), given a test case by Adrien Clerc.
* Thomas Eschenbacher fixed a bug in the format 6 repository code that
would crash when there is an obscure problem and a B-tree code can't
be found in the tree.
* Tom Chiverton pointed out that the manual page was using "obnam
restore" instead of "obnam mount" in an example for "obnam mount".
* The yarn test suite now runs FUSE tests (`obnam mount`) when
`fusermount` is available, rather than checking for membership in
the group `fuse`. The latter is a Debianism (fixed in Debian
`jessie`).
* Thomas Waldmann noticed that `obnam verify` didn't notice that a
file had new data, when the modification time was the same. Obnam
now notices this.
* Thomas Waldmann fixed many typos and minor bugs in the source code.
* Laurence Perkins reported that the Tahoe-LAFS SFTP server returned
some `stat` fields as None. Fixed to change those to be 0 instead.
* Lars Wirzenius fixed double-downloading of chunks during restores.
Version 1.8, released 2014-05-13
--------------------------------
* The error message has been improved for when setting metadata
(owner, permission, and similar) of a restored file fails.
* `obnam force-lock` now works even when the client running it is not
in the client list.
Security issues:
* Joey Hess found a problem in `obnam restore`: restored files would
be created with quite liberal default permissions, which would be
set to the backed-up permissions later. This could allow a snooper
to read files they shouldn't be. This has been fixed now by using
restrictive default permissions. A workaround for older versions is
to create a directory, set its permissions to 0700, and restore to a
subdirectory of that directory.
Bug fixes:
* `--help` output no longer shows the default value of any options. It
was shown only for a few options anyway. The proper way to see the
current settings is with the `--dump-config` option. The bug that
was fixed that the generated manual page no longer contains values
that are specific to the machine doing the generation, such as the
hostname as the default value for `--client-name`. Reported by
SanskritFritz.
* When a file was backed up, and later excluded with `--exclude`,
Obnam wouldn't remove it from the new backups. Now it does. Bug
fixed by Anssi Hannula, though his patch got changed because it no
longer applied.
* When restoring extended attributes _not_ in the user namespace
(named like `user.foo`) Obnam now ignores them, instead of trying to
set them and crashing.
* When restoring from a directory that is not a repository, the
error message is now clearer.
* Obnam would previously allow the backup root to be a symbolic link
pointing at a directory. However, this only worked for backups. No
other operations would work and would only see the symbolic link,
not the directory it pointed at. Obnam now gives an error message
even for the backup.
* Obnam no longer excludes files named `syslog` or `none`, if the
setting `--log=none` or `--log=syslog` is used.
Version 1.7.4, released 2014-03-31
--------------------------------
* The manual is now dual-licensed under GNU GPL v3 or later, and
Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0.
* The 1.7.3 release never went out. Let's pretend it wasn't even
tagged in git, and everyone will be happy.
Bug fixes:
* Obnam FUSE got another bug fix from Valery Yundin, to fix a bug I
introduced in 1.7. Reading big files via `obnam mount` should now
work better.
* Fix count of backed up files. It used to always count directories.
Reported by Alberto Fuentes as Debian bug
[742384](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742384).
* `obnam diff latest` would fail due to a programming error. Reported
by Junyx.
Version 1.7.2, released 2014-03-22
--------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* Fix another bug in the FUSE plugin's file reading code, found during
the release process of 1.7.2.
Version 1.7.1, released 2014-03-22
--------------------------------
* The `dump-repo` command now outputs JSON instead of YAML. The
dependency on PyYAML is no longer.
Bug fixes:
* Nemo Inis found a bug in the FUSE plugin (`obnam mount`), where
Obnam would return the wrong data when the program reading the file
didn't read the whole file from the beginning in one read(2) system
call.
* The test suite now skips tests that require use of extended
attributes in the `user` namespace. This should allow the test suite
to be run on more build servers run by various distributions.
Version 1.7, released 2014-03-15
--------------------------------
WARNING: This release has had fairly large parts of the internals
re-written. There shouldn't be any externally visible changes due to
that, but there is a chance of bugs. Be careful. Make a copy of your
backup repository before upgrading, if you can.
* The `convert5to6` subcommand has been removed. If you need to
convert from a pre-1.0 backup repository, and haven't done so yet,
please use Obnam version 1.6.1 or earlier to do so.
* A new `backup-finished` hook is provided by the backup plugin, so
that other plugins may do processing at the end of a backup, such as
report the successful backup to a monitoring system. Patch by
Enrico Tröger.
* The FUSE plugin can now refresh its view, by having the user read
the `.pid` file. Patch by Valery Yundin.
* New option `--always-restore-setuid` to always restore setuid/setgid
flags in permissions, even if the restore is not being run by `root`
or the owner of the files (as recorded in the backup).
* New option `--exclude-from` allows exclusion patterns to be given in
a separate file (one per line), instead of in a configuration file
or on the command line. Patch by Enrico Tröger.
* A start of a manual for Obnam. This will gain more content with
new releases. The current versions is mainly an edited version of
Lars's blog posts about backups, plus the Obnam tutorial from the
Obnam homepage. See for
rendered versions (PDF, HTML).
* Most of the error messages Obnam produces now have a unique error
code: `ERROR: R0B15DX: Cannot find requested generation for client
havelock` for example. More error messages will gain error codes in
future releases. The error codes are meant to be easy to search for,
and will allow error messages to be translated in the future.
* The `obnam-benchmark` program got rewritten so that it'll do
something useful, but at the same time, it is no longer useful as a
general tool. It is now expected to be run from the Obnam source
tree (a cloned git repository), and isn't installed anymore.
* The log file now includes information about the transfer overhead to
the repository. Overhead is all the bytes that are not file content
data: filenames, permission bits, extended attributes, etc, plus
Obnam internal bookkeeping.
* `obnam verify` now shows progress both based on number of files and
amount of data.
Bug fixes:
* Obnam now doesn't remove chunks that are shared between clients.
Previously, this would sometimes happen, because only the first
client would correctly record itself as using a chunk. Now all
clients do that.
* Obnam now creates a `trustdb.gpg` in the temporary GNUPGHOME it uses
during encryption operations. From version 2.0.22 (or thereabouts),
`gpg` insists on having a `trustdb.gpg` in the GNUPGHOME it uses.
* When backing up a large file, and making a checkpoint generation in
the middle of it, Obnam would say "continuing backup" after the
checkpoint was finished, instead of saying the name of the file.
This is now fixed.
Internal changes:
* The `obnamlib.Error` exception class has been replaced by the
`obnamlib.ObnamError` class, which derives from the new
`obnamlib.StructuredError` class. All new exceptions will need
to be derived from `obnamlib.Error` in the future. Also, due to the
way `StructuredError` works, it is now necessary to create a new
exception class for each kind of error. This gives us unique the
error codes mentioned above.
* The old `obnamlib.Repository` class is gone, and replaced with the
`obnamlib.RepositoryInterface` class, which gets implemented for
each repository format (there is only one, for now, but there will
be more).
Version 1.6.1, released 2013-11-30
----------------------------------
* Fix Debian package dependencies correctly.
Version 1.6, released 2013-11-30
--------------------------------
* Stop logging paramiko exceptions that get converted into another
type of exception by the SFTP plugin in Obnam.
* `obnam-benchmark` can now use an installed version of larch.
Patch by Lars Kruse.
* Obnam has been ported to FreeBSD by Itamar Turner-Trauring
of HybridCluster.
* Backup progress reporting now reports scanned file data, not just
backed up file data. This will hopefully be less confusing to people.
* The `list-keys`, `client-keys`, and `list-toplevels` commands now
obey a new option, `--key-details`, to show the usernames attached
to each public key. Patch by Lars Kruse.
* New option `--ssh-command` to set the command Obnam runs
when invoking ssh. patch by Lars Kruse.
* `obnam clients` can now be used without being an existing client.
Patch by Itamar Turner-Trauring.
* New option `--ssh-host-keys-check` to better specify how SSH
host keys should be checked. Patch by Itamar Turner-Trauring.
Bug fixes:
* Fix`"obnam list-toplevels` so it doesn't give an error when it's
unable to read the per-client directory of another client, when
encryption is used. Fix by Lars Kruse.
* Fix the encryption plugin to give a better error message when it
looks for client directories but fails to find them. Fix by
Lars Kruse.
* `obnam list-toplevels` got confused when the repository contained
extra files, such as "lock" (left there by a previous, crashed Obnam
run). It no longer does. Fix by Lars Kruse.
* The SFTP plugin now handles another error code (EACCES) when writing
a file and the directory it should go into not existing. Patch by
Armin Größlinger.
* Obnam's manual page now explains about breaking long logical lines
into multiple physical ones.
* The `/~/` path prefix in SFTP URLs works again, at least with
sufficiently new versions of Paramiko (1.7.7.1 in Debian wheezy is
OK). Reported by Lars Kruse.
* The Nagios plugin to report errors in a way Nagios expects.
Patch by Martijn Grendelman.
* The Nagios plugin for Obnam now correctly handles the case
where a backup repository for a client exists, but does not have
a backup yet. Patch by Lars Kruse.
* `obnam ls` now handles trailing slashes in filename arguments.
Reported by Biltong.
* When restoring a backup, Obnam will now continue past errors,
instead of aborting with the first one. Patch by Itamar
Turner-Trauring.
Version 1.5, released 2013-08-08
--------------------------------
Bug fixes:
* Terminal progress reporting now updated only every 0.1 seconds,
instead of 0.01 seconds, to reduce terminal emulator CPU usage.
Reported by Neal Becker.
* Empty exclude patterns are ignored. Previously, a configuration file
line such as "exclude = foo, bar," (note trailing comma) would result
in an empty pattern, which would match everything, and therefore
nothing would be backed up. Reported by Sharon Kimble.
* A FUSE plugin to access (read-only) data from the backup repository
has been added. Written by Valery Yundin.
Version 1.4, released 2013-03-16
--------------------------------
* The``ls` command now takes filenames as (optional) arguments, instead
of a list of generations. Based on patch by Damien Couroussé.
* Even more detailed progress reporting during a backup.
* Add --fsck-skip-generations option to tell fsck to not check any
generation metadata.
* The default log level is now INFO, instead of DEBUG. This is to be
considered a quantum leap in the continuing rise of the maturity level
of the software. (Actually, the change is there just to save some
disk space and I/O for people who don't want to be involved in Obnam
development and don't want to have massive log files.)
* The default sizes for the `lru-size` and `upload-queue-size` settings
have been reduced, to reduce the memory impact of Obnam.
* `obnam restore` now reports transfer statistics at the end, similarly
to what `obnam backup` does. Suggested by "S. B.".
Bug fixes:
* If listing extended attributes for a filesystem that does not support
them, Obnam no longer crashes, just silently does not backup extended
attributes. Which aren't there anyway.
* A bug in handling stat lookup errors was fixed. Reported by
Peter Palfrader. Symptom: `AttributeError: 'exceptions.OSError'
object has no attribute 'st_ino'` in an error message or log file.
* A bug in a restore crashing when failing to set extended attributes
on the restored file was fixed. Reported by "S. B.".
* Made it clearer what is happening when unlocking the repository due to
errors, and fixed it so that a failure to unlock is also an error.
Reported by andrewsh.
* The dependency on Larch is now for 1.20121216 or newer, since that is
needed for fsck to work.
* The manual page did not document the client name arguments to the
`add-key` and `remove-key` subcommands. Reported by Lars Kruse.
* Restoring symlinks as root would fail. Reported and fixed by
David Fries.
* Only set ssh user/port if explicitly requested, otherwise let ssh
select them. Reported by Michael Goetze, fixed by David Fries.
* Fix problem with old version of paramiko and chdir. Fixed by Nick Altmann.
* Fix problems with signed vs unsigned values for struct stat fields.
Reported by Henning Verbeek.
Version 1.3, released 2012-12-16
--------------------------------
* When creating files in the backup repository, Obnam tries to avoid NFS
synchronisation problems by first writing a temporary file and then
creating a hardlink to the actual filename. This works badly on filesystems
that do not allow hard links, such as VFAT. If creating the hardlink
fails, Obnam now further tries to use the `open(2)` system call with
the `O_EXCL` flag to create the target file. This should allow things
to work with both NFS and VFAT.
* More detailed progress reporting during the backup.
* Manual page now covers the diff subcommand. Patch by Peter Valdemar Mørch.
* Speed optimisation patch for backing up files in inode numbering order,
from Christophe Vu-Brugier.
* A setuid or setgid bit is now not restored if Obnam is not used by root
or the same user as the owner of the restored file.
* Many new settings to control "obnam fsck", mainly to reduce the amount
of checking being done in order to make it faster. However, fsck is
has lost some features (checks), which will be added back in a future
release.
* More frequent fsck progress reporting. Some speed optimisations to fsck.
Bug fixes:
* Empty values for extended attributes are now backed up correctly.
Previously they would cause an infinite loop.
* Extended attributes without values are now ignored. This is different
from attributes with empty values. Reported by Vladimir Elisseev.
* An empty port number in sftp URLs is now handled correctly. Found based
on report by Anton Shevtsov.
* A bad performance bug when backing up full systems (starting from the
filesystem root directory) has been fixed. At the beginning of each
generation, Obnam removes any directories that are not part of the
current backup roots. This is necessary so that if you change the
backup roots, the old stuff doesn't hang around forever. However, when
the backup root is the filesystem root, due to the now-fixed bug Obnam
would first remove everything, and then back it up all over again. This
"worked", but was quite slow. Thanks to Nix for reporting the problem.
* Obnam now runs GnuPG explicitly with the "no text mode" setting, to override
a "text mode" setting in the user's configuration. The files Obnam encrypts
need to be treated as binary, not text files. Reported by Robin Sheat.
* A shared B-tree concurrency bug has been fixed: If another instance of
Obnam was modifying a shared B-tree, Obnam would crash and abort a backup,
possibly leaving lock files lying around. Now a failure to look up a chunk
via its checksum is ignored, and the backup continues.
* Bugs in how Python OSError exceptions were being raises have been fixed.
Error messages should now be somewhat clearer.
* Unset or wrongly set variable "full" fixed in "obnam diff". Reported
by ROGERIO DE CARVALHO BASTOS and patched by Peter Valdemar Mørch.
* Setuid and setgid bits are now restored correctly, when restore happens
as root. Reported by Pavel Kokolemin.
* Obnam now complains if no backup roots have been specified.
Version 1.2, released 2012-10-06
--------------------------------
* Added a note to `--node-size` that it only affects new B-trees.
Thanks, Michael Brown.
* New `obnam diff` subcommand to show differences (added/removed/modified
files) between two generations, by Peter Valdemar Mørch.
* `obnam backup` now logs the names of files that are getting backed up
at the INFO level rather than DEBUG.
* The command synopsises for backup, restore, and verify commands now
make it clearer that Obnam only accepts directories, not individual
files, as arguments. (For now.)
* The output from the `show` plugin can now be redirected with the
`--output=FILE` option. Affected subcommands: `clients`, `generations`,
`genids`, `ls`, `diff`, `nagios-last-backup-age`.
Bug fixes:
* Notify user of errors during backups.
* The SFTP plugin now manages to deal with repository paths starting
with `/~/` which already exist without crashing.
* Character and block device nodes are now restored correctly.
Thanks to Martin Dummer for the bug report.
* The symmetric key for a toplevel repository directory is re-encrypted
when a public key is added or removed to the toplevel using the
`add-key` or `remove-key` subcommands.
* Manual page typo fix. Thanks, Steve Kemp.
Version 1.1, released 2012-06-30
--------------------------------
* Mark the `--small-files-in-btree` settings as deprecated.
* Obnam now correctly checks that `--repository` is set.
* Options in `--help` output are now grouped in random senseless ways
rather than being in one randomly ordered group.
* Manual page clarification for `--root` and `verify`. Thanks, Saint Germain.
* Remove outdated section from manual page explaining that there is not
format conversion. Thanks, Elrond of Samba-TNG.
* Added missing information about specifying a user in sftp URLs. Thanks,
Joey Hess, for pointing it out.
* Manual page clarification on `--keep` from Damien Couroussé.
* Make `obnam forget` report which generations it would remove without
`--pretend`. Thanks, Neal Becker, for the suggestion.
Version 1.0, released 2012-06-01
--------------------------------
* Fixed bug in finding duplicate files during a backup generation.
Thanks to Saint Germain for reporting the problem.
* Changed version number to 1.0.
Version 0.30, released 2012-05-30; a RELEASE CANDIDATE
------------------------------------------------------
Only bug fixes, and only in the test suite.
* Fix test case problem when `$TMPDIR` lacks `user_xattr`. The extended
attributes test won't succeed in that case, and it's pointless to run it.
* Fix test case problem when `$TMPDIR` lacks nanosecond timestamps for
files. The test case now ignores such timestamps, making the test pass
anyway. The timestamp accuracy is not important for this test.
Version 0.29, released 2012-05-27; a RELEASE CANDIDATE
------------------------------------------------------
* "obnam backup" now writes performance statistics at the end of a backup run.
Search the log for "Backup performance statistics" (INFO level).
* "obnam verify" now continues past the first error. Thanks to Rafał Gwiazda
for requesting this.
* Add an `obnam-viewprof` utility to translate Python profiling output
into human readable text form.
* Bug fix: If a file's extended attributes have changed in any way, the change
is now backed up.
* "obnam fsck" is now a bit faster.
* The shared directories in the repository are now locked only during updates,
allowing more efficient concurrent backups between several computers.
* Obnam now gives a better error message when a backup root is not a
directory. Thanks to Edward Allcutt for reporting the error
().
* The output format of "obnam ls" has changed. It now has one line per
file, and includes the full pathname of the file, rather mimicking the
output of "ls -lAR". Thanks to Edward Allcutt for the suggestion
().
* A few optimizations to sftp speed. Small files are still slow.
Version 0.28, released 2012-05-10; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
* `force-lock` should now remove all locks.
* Out-of-space errors in the repository now terminate the backup process.
Previously, Obnam would continue, ignoring the failure to write. If you
make space in the repository and restart Obnam, it will continue from
the previous checkpoint.
* The convert5to6 black box test now works even if run by other people
than liw.
* "obnam backup" now uses a single SFTP connection to the backup repository,
rather than opening a new one after each checkpoint generation. Thanks to
weinzwang for reporting the problem.
* "obnam verify" now obeys the `--quiet` option.
* "obnam backup" no longer counts chunks already in the repository in the
uploaded amount of data.
Version 0.27, released 2012-04-30; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
* The repository format has again changed in an incompatible manner,
so you will need to re-backup everything again. Alternatively, you can
try the new `convert5to6` subcommand. See the manual page for details.
Make sure you have a copy of the repository before converting, the
code is new and may be buggy.
* New option `--small-files-in-btree` enables Obnam to store the contents
of small files in the per-client B-tree. This is not the default, at
least yet, since it's impact on real life performance is unknown, but
it should make things go a bit faster for high latency repository
connections.
* Some SFTP related speed optimizations.
* Data filtering is now strictly stable and priority-ordered, ensuring that
compression always happens before encryption etc.
* Repository metadata is never filtered, so that we can be sure that
in future if when we add backwards-compatibility we can detect the format
without worrying about any other filtering which might occur.
* Forcing of locks is now unconditional and across the entire repository.
* Uses the larch 0.30 read-only mode to fix a bug where opening a B-tree
rolls back changes someone else is making, even if we only use the tree
to read stuff from.
* "obnam backup" will now exit with a non-zero exit code if there were
any errors during a backup, and the problematic files were skipped.
Thanks, Peter Palfrader, for reporting the bug.
* "obnam forget" is now a bit faster.
* Hash collisions for filenames are now handled.
Version 0.26, released 2012-03-26; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
* Clients now lock the parts of the backup repository they're using,
while making any changes, so that multiple clients can work at the
same time without corrupting the repository.
* Now depends on a larch 0.28, which uses journalling to avoid on-disk
inconsistencies and corruption during crashes.
* Compression and encryption can now be used together.
Version 0.25, released 2012-02-18; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
* Log files are now created with permissions that allow only the owner
to read or write them. This fixes a privacy leak.
* The `nagios-last-backup-age` subcommand is useful for setting up Nagios
(or similar systems) to check that backups get run properly. Thanks to
Peter Palfrader for the patch.
* Some clarification on how the forget policy works, prompted by questions
from Peter Palfrader.
* New settings `ssh-known-hosts` (for choosing which file to check for
known host keys), `strict-ssh-host-keys` (for disallowing unknown host
keys), and `ssh-key` (for choosing which key file to use for SSH
connections) allow better and safer use of ssh.
* Checkpoints will now happen even in the middle of files (but between
chunks).
* The `--pretend` option now works for backups as well.
BUG FIXES:
* `obnam ls` now shows the correct timestamps for generations.
Thanks, Anders Wirzenius.
Version 0.24.1, released 2011-12-24; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
BUG FIX:
* Fix test case for file timestamps with sub-second resolution. Not all
filesystems have that, so the test case has been changed to accept lack
of sub-second timestamps.
Version 0.24, released 2011-12-18; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
USER VISIBLE CHANGES
* The way file timestamps (modification and access times) have changed,
to fix inaccuracies introduced by the old way. Times are now stored
as two integers giving full seconds and nanoseconds past the full
second, instead of the weird earlier system that was imposed by Python's
use of floating point for the timestamps. This causes the repository
format version to be bumped, resulting in a need to start over with an
empty repository.
* Extended file attributes are now backed up from and restored to local
filesystems. They are neither backed up, nor restored for live data
accessed over SFTP.
* If the `--exclude` regular expression is wrong, Obnam now gives an
error message and then ignores the regexp, rather than crashing.
* There is now a compression plugin, enabled with `--compress-with=gzip`.
* De-duplication mode can now be chosen by the user: the new
`--deduplicate` setting can be one of `never` (fast, but uses more space);
`verify` (slow, but handles hash collisions gracefully); and
`fatalist` (fast, but lossy, if there is a hash collision). `fatalist`
is the default mode.
* Restores now obey the `--dry-run` option. Thanks to Peter Palfreder for
the bug report.
* New option `--verify-randomly` allows you to check only a part of the
backup, instead of everything.
* Verify now has some progress reporting.
* Forget is now much faster.
* Forget now has progress reporting. It is not fast enough to do without,
sorry.
* Backup now removes any checkpoint generations it created during a backup
run, if it succeeds without errors.
BUG FIXES:
* Now works with a repository on sshfs. Thanks to Dafydd Harries for
reporting the problem.
* Now depends on a newer version of the larch library, fixing a problem
when the Obnam default node size changes and an existing repository
has a different size.
* User and group names for sftp live data are no longer queried from the
local system. Instead, they're marked as unknown.
Version 0.23, released 2011-10-02; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
USER VISIBLE CHANGES:
* `restore` now shows a progress bar.
* `fsck` now has more useful progress reporting, and does more checking,
including the integrity of the contents of file content.
* `fsck` now also checks the integrity of the B-trees in the repository,
so that it is not necessary to run `fsck-larch` manually anymore. This
works remotely as well, whereas `fsck-larch` only worked on B-trees
on the local filesystem.
* `force-lock` now gives a warning if the client does not exist in the
repository.
* Subcommands for encryption now give a warning if encryption key is not
given.
* The `--fsck-fix` option will now instruct `obnam fsck` to try to fix
problems found. For this release, it only means fixing B-tree missing
node problems, but more will follow.
* The default sizes have been changed for B-tree nodes (256 KiB)
and file contents chunks (1 MiB), based on benchmarking.
* SFTP protocol use has been optimized, which should result in some
more speed. This also highlights the need to change obnam so it can
do uploads in the background.
* If a client does not exist in the repository, `force-lock` now gives
a warning to the user, rather than ignoring it silently.
DEVELOPER CHANGES:
* New `--sftp-delay=100` option can be used to simulate SFTP backups over
networks with long round trip times.
* `obnam-benchmark` can now use `--sftp-delay` and other changes to make
it more useful.
INTERNAL CHANGES:
* Got rid of terminal status plugin. Now, the `Application` class provides
a `ttystatus.TerminalStatus` instance instead, in the `ts` attribute.
Other plugins are supposed to use that for progress reporting and
messaging to the user.
* The `posix_fadvise` system call is used only if available. This should
improve Obnam's portability a bit.
Version 0.22, released 2011-08-25; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
USER VISIBLE CHANGES:
* Obnam now reports its current configuration in the log file at startup.
This will hopefully remove one round of "did you use the --foo option?"
questions between developers and bug reporters.
BUG FIXES:
* The repository is now unlocked on exit only if it is still locked.
* A wrongly caught `GeneratorExit` is now dealt with properly.
* Keyboard interrupts are logged, so they don't show up as anonymous errors.
CHANGES RELEVANT TO DEVELOPERS ONLY:
* `setup.py` has been enhanced to work more like the old `Makefile` did:
`clean` removes more artifacts. Instructions in `README` have been updated
to point at `setup.py`.
* Compiler warning about `_XOPEN_SOURCE` re-definition fixed.
* Tests are now again run during a Debian package build.
Version 0.21, released 2011-08-23; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
USER VISIBLE CHANGES:
* Obnam will now unlock the repository if there's an error during a backup.
For the most part, the `force-lock` operation should now be unnecessary,
but it's still there in case it's useful some day.
BUG FIXES:
* Negative timestamps for files now work. Thanks to Jamil Djadala
for reporting the bug.
* The documentation for --checkpoint units fixed. Thanks, user weinzwang
from IRC.
* The connections to the repository and live data filesystem are now
properly closed. This makes benchmark read/write statistics be correct.
Version 0.20.1, released 2011-08-11; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
BUG FIXES:
* More cases of Unicode strings versus plain strings in filenames
over SFTP fixed. Thanks to Tapani Tarvainen.
Version 0.20, released 2011-08-09; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
BUG FIXES:
* Non-ASCII filenames over SFTP root now work. (Thanks, Tapani Tarvainen,
for the reproducible bug report.)
* The count of files while making a backup now counts all files found,
not just those backed up. The old behavior was confusing people.
USER VISIBLE CHANGES:
* The output of `obnam ls` now formats the columns a little prettier,
so that wide values do not cause misalignment.
* The error message when trying to use an encrypted repository without
encryption is now better (and suggests missing encryption being the
reason). Thanks, chrysn.
* Obnam now supports backing up of Unix sockets.
Version 0.19, released 2011-08-03; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
INCOMPATIBILITY CHANGES:
* We now require version 0.21 of the `larch` library, and this requires
bumping the repository format. This means old backup repositories can't
be used with this version, and you need to back up everything again.
(Please tell me when this becomes a problem.)
BUG FIXES:
* Found one more place where a file going missing during a backup may
cause a crash.
* Typo in error message about on-disk formats fixed.
(Thanks, Tapani Tarvainen.)
* The `--trace` option works again.
* `fcntl.F_SETFL` does not seem to work on file descriptors for files
owned by root that are read-only to the user running obnam. Worked
around by ignoring any problems with setting the flags.
* The funnest bug in this release: if no log file was specified with `--log`,
the current working directory was excluded from the backup.
USER VISIBLE CHANGES:
* `obnam(1)` manual page now discusses how configuration files are used.
* The manual page describes problems using sftp to access live data.
* The documentation for `--no-act` was clarified to say it only works
for `forget. (Thanks, Daniel Silverstone.)
* `obnam-benchmark` now has a manual page.
* The backup plugin logs files it excludes, so the user can find out what's
going on. A confused user is an unhappy user.
INTERNAL STUFF:
* Tracing statements added to various parts of the code, to help debug
mysterious problems.
* All exceptions are derived from `obnamlib.AppException` or
`obnamlib.Error`, and those are derived from `cliapp.AppException`,
so that the user gets nicer error messages than Python stack traces.
* `blackboxtests` is no longer run under fakeroot, because Debian packages
are built under fakeroot, and fakeroot within fakeroot causes trouble.
However, the point of running tests under fakeroot was to make sure
certain kinds of bugs are caught, and since Debian package building runs
the tests anyway, the test coverage is not actually diminished.
* The `Makefile` has new targets `fast-check` and `network-tests`. The
latter runs tests over sftp to localhost.
Version 0.18, released 2011-07-20; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
* The repository format has again changed in an incompatible manner,
so you will need to re-backup everything again. (If this is a problem,
tell me, and I'll consider adding backwards compatibility before 1.0
is released.)
* New option `--exclude-caches` allows automatic exclusion of cache
directories that are marked as such.
* Obnam now makes files in the repository be read-only, so that they're
that much harder to delete by mistake.
* Error message about files that can't be backed up now mentions the
correct file.
* Bugfix: unreadable files and directories no longer cause the backup
to fail. The problems are reported, but the backup continues.
Thanks to Jeff Epler for reporting the bug.
* Speed improvement from Jeff Epler for excluding files from backups.
* Various other speed improvements.
* Bugfix: restoring symlinks now works even if the symlink is restored
before its target. Also, the permissions of the symlink (rather than its
target) are now restored correctly. Thanks to Jeff Epler for an
exemplary bug report.
* New option `--one-file-system`, from Jeff Epler.
* New benchmarking tool `obnam-benchmark`, which is more flexible than
the old `run-benchmark`.
* When encrypting/decrypting data with GnuPG, temporary files are no
longer used.
* When verifying, `.../foo` and `.../foo/` now work the same way.
* New option `--symmetric-key-bits`.
* The chunk directory uses more hierarchy levels, and the way chunks
are stored there is now user-configurable (but you'll get into trouble
if you don't always use the same configuration). This should speed
things up a bit once the number of chunks grows very large.
* New `--chunkids-per-group` option, for yet more knobs to tweak when
searching for optimal performance.
* Local files are now opened using `O_NOATIME` so they can be backed
up without affecting timestamps.
* Now uses the `cliapp` framework for writing command line applications.
The primary user-visible effect is that the manpage now has an
accurate list of options.
* Bugfix: Obnam now again reports VFS I/O statistics.
* Bugfix: Obnam can again back up live data that is accessed using sftp.
Thanks to Tapani Tarvainen for reporting the problem.
Version 0.17, released 2011-05-21; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
* This is the second BETA release.
* The `run-benchmark` script now works with the new version of `seivot`.
The only benchmark size is one gibibyte, for now, because Obnam's too
slow to do big ones in reasonable time. As an aside, the benchmark
script got rewritten in Python, so it can be made more flexible.
* Benchmarks are run using encrypted backups.
* The kernel buffer cache is dropped before each obnam run, so the
benchmark result is more realistic (read: slower).
* Obnam now rotates its logs. See `--log-max` and `--log-keep` options
in the manual page. The default location for the log file is now
`~/.cache/obnam/obnam.log` for people, and
`/var/log/obnam.log` for root.
* Obnam now restores sparse files correctly.
* There have been some speed improvements to Obnam.
* The `--repository` option now has the shorter alias `-r`, since it
gets used so often.
* `obnam force-lock` now merely gives an error message, instead of a
Python stack trace, if the repository does not exist.
* Obnam now does not crash if files go missing during a backup, or can't
be read, or there are other problems with them. It will report the
problem, but then continue as if it had never heard of the file.
* Obnam now supports FIFO files.
* Obnam now verifies checksums when it restores files.
* Obnam now stores the checksum for the whole file, not just the checksum
for each chunk of its contents.
* Obnam's own log file is automatically excluded from backups.
* Obnam now stores and restores file timestamps to full accuracy,
instead of truncating them to whole seconds.
* The format of the backup repository has changed in an incompatible way,
and Obnam will now refuse to use an old repository. This means you
will need to use an old version to restore from them, and need to
re-backup everything. Sorry.
Version 0.16, released 2011-07-17; a BETA release
-------------------------------------------------
* This is the first BETA release. Obnam should now be feature complete
for real use. Performance is lacking and there are many bugs remaining.
There are no known bugs that would corrupt backed up data, or prevent
its recovery.
* Add encryption support. See the manual page for how to use it.
Version 0.15.1, released 2011-03-21; an ALPHA release
----------------------------------------------------
* Fix `setup.py` to not import `obnamlib`, so it works when building under
pbuilder on Debian. Meh.
Version 0.15, released 2011-03-21; an ALPHA release
----------------------------------------------------
Bugs fixed:
* Manual page GPL copyright blurb is now properly marked up as a comment.
(Thanks, Joey Hess.)
* README now links to python-lru correctly. (Thanks, Erik Johansson.)
Improvements and other changes:
* Filenames and directories are backed up in sorted order. This should
make it easier to know how far obnam's gotten.
* The location where backups are stored is now called the repository,
instead of the store. Suggested by Joey Hess.
* The repository and the target directory for restored data are now
both created by Obnam, if they don't already exist. Suggested by
Joey Hess.
* Better control of logging, using the new `--trace` option.
* Manual page now explains making backups a little better.
* Default value for `--lru-size` reduced to 500, for great improvement
in memory used, without, it seems, much decrease in speed.
* `obnam verify` now reports success explicitly. Based on question
from Joey Hess.
* `obnam verify` now accepts both non-option arguments and the `--root`
option. Suggested by Joey Hess.
* `obnam forget` now accepts "generation specifiers", not just numeric
generation ids. This means that `obnam forget latest` works.
* I/O statistics are logged more systematically.
* `obnam force-lock` introduced, to allow breaking a lock left behind
if obnam crashes. But it never does, of course. (Well, except if there's
a bug, like when a file changes at the wrong moment.)
* `obnam genids` introduced, to list generation ids without any other data.
The old command `obnam generations` still works, and lists other info
about each generation as well, but that's sometimes bad for scripting.
* The `--dump-memory-profile` option now accepts the value `simple`, for
reporting basic memory use. It has such a small impact that it's the
default.
* Obnam now stores the version of the on-disk format in the repository.
This should allow it to handle repositories created by a different
version and act suitably (hopefully without wiping all your backups).
Version 0.14, released 2010-12-29; an ALPHA release
----------------------------------------------------
This version is capable of backing up my laptop's home directory.
It is, however, still an ALPHA release, and you should not rely on
it as your sole form of backup. It is also slow. But if you're
curious, now would be a good time to try it out a bit.
Bug fixes:
* `COPYING` now contains GPL version 3, instead of 2. The code was
licensed under version 3 already. (Thank you Greg Grossmeier.)
* The manual page now uses `-` and `\-` correctly.
* `obnam forget` now actually removes data that is no longer used by
any generation.
* When backing up a new generation, if any of the root directories for
the backup got dropped by the user, they are now also removed from
the backup generation. Old generations obviously still have them.
* Only the per-client B-tree forest should have multiple trees. Now this
actually happens, whereas previously sometimes a very large number of
new trees would be created in some forests. (What's good for rain
forests is not good for saving disk space.)
* When recursing through directory trees, obnam no longer follows
symlinks to directories.
* obnam no longer creates a missing backup store when backing up to
a local disk. It never did this when backing up via sftp. (This
saves me from figuring out which of `store`, `stor`, and `sorte`
is the real directory.)
New features and stuff:
* `blackboxtest` has been rewritten to use Python's `unittest`
framework, rather than a homegrown bad re-implementation of some of it.
* `obnam ls` interprets arguments as "genspecs" rather than generation
identifiers. This means `obnam ls latest` works, and now `latest` is
also the default if you don't give any spec.
* `run-benchmarks` now outputs results into a git checkout of
, an ikiwiki instance hosted by
. The script also puts the results into
a suitable sub-directory, adds a page for the RSS feed of benchmark
results, and updates the report page that summarizes all stored results.
* There is now a 100 GiB benchmark.
* Clients are now called clients, instead of hosts. This terminology should
be clearer.
* The list of clients now stores a random integer identifier for each client
(unique within the store). The identifier is used as the name of the
per-client B-tree directory, rather than the hostname of the client.
This should prevent a teeny tiny bit of information leakage. It also
makes debugging things much harder.
* Various refactorings and prettifications of the code has happened.
For example, several classes have been split off from the `store.py`
module. This has also resulted in much better test coverage for those
classes.
* The per-client trees (formerly GenerationStore, now ClientMetadataTree)
have a more complicated key now: 4 parts, not 3. This makes it easier
to keep separate data about files, and other data that needs to be
stored per-generation, such as what the generation id is.
* `find-duplicate-chunks`, a tool for finding duplicate chunks of data
in a files in a directory tree, was added to the tree. I have used it
to find out if is worthwhile to do duplicate chunk removal at all.
(It is, at least for my data.) Also, it can be used to find good
values for chunk sizes for duplicate detection.
* The whole way in which obnam does de-duplication got re-designed and
re-implemented. This is tricky stuff, when there is more than one client.
* `SftpFS` now uses a hack copied from bzrlib, to use openssh if it is
available, and paramiko only if it is not. This speeds up sftp data
transfers quite a bit. (Where bzrlib supports more than just openssh,
we don't, since I have no way to test the other stuff. Patches welcome.)
* The way lists of chunk ids are stored for files got changed. Now we store
several ids per list item, which is faster and also saves some space
in the B-tree nodes. Also, it is now possible to append to the list,
which means the caller does not need to first gather a list of all ids.
Such a list gets quite costly when the file is quite big (e.g., in the
terabyte size).
* New `--dump-memory-profile` option was added to help do memory profiling
with meliae or heapy have been added. (Obnam's memory consumption finally
got annoying enough that I did something about it.)
Removed stuff:
* The functional specification was badly outdated, and has been removed.
I decided to stop kidding myself that I would keep it up to date.
* The store design document has been removed from the store tree.
The online version at is the
canonical version, and is actually kept up to date.
* The benchmark specification has likewise been replaced with
.
Version 0.13, released 2010-07-13; an ALPHA release
----------------------------------------------------
* Bug fix: a mistake in 0.12 caused checkpoints to happen after each
file after the first checkpoint. Now they happen at the right intervals
again.
* Upload speed is now displayed during backups.
* Obnam now tells the kernel that it shouldn't cache data it reads or
writes. It is not likely that data being backed up is going to be
needed again any time soon, so there's no point in caching it.
(The posix_fadvise call is used for this.)
* New --lru-size option sets size of LRU cache for nodes in memory.
The obnam default is large enough to suit large backups. This uses more
memory, but is faster than btree's small default of 100.
Version 0.12, released 2010-07-11; an ALPHA release
----------------------------------------------------
* NOTE: This version makes incompatible changes to the way data is stored
on-disk. Backups made with older versions are NOT supported. Sorry.
* The run-benchmark script has dropped some smaller sizes (they're too
fast to be interesting), and adds a 10 GiB test size.
* Various speed optimizations. Most importantly, the way file metadata
(results of lstat(2)) are encoded has changed. This is the incompatible
change from above. It's much faster now, though.
* Preliminary support for using SFTP for the backup store added. Hasn't
been used much yet, so might well be very buggy.
Version 0.11, released 2010-07-05; an ALPHA release
----------------------------------------------------
* Speed optimizations:
- chunk identifiers are now sequential, except for the first one, or
when there's a collision
- chunks are now stored in a more sensible directory hierarchy (instead
of one per directory, on average)
- adding files to a directory in the backup store is now faster
- only store a file's metadata that if it is changed
* New --exclude=regexp option to exclude files based on pathnames
* Obnam now makes checkpoints during backups. If a backup is aborted
in the middle and then re-started, it will continue from the latest
checkpoint rather than from the beginning of the previous backup run.
- New option --checkpoint to set the interval between checkpoints.
Defaults to 1 GiB.
* Options for various B-tree settings. This is mostly useful for finding
the optimal set of defaults, but may be useful in other situations for
some people.
- New options --chunk-group-size, --chunk-size, --node-size,
--upload-queue-size.
* Somewhat better progress reporting during backups.
Version 0.10, released 2010-06-29; an ALPHA release
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* Rewritten from scratch.
* Old NEWS file entries removed (see bzr if you're interested).