Kup Backup System

Kup gives you fast incremental backups and makes it very easy to take them. If too long time has passed since the last backup Kup will remind you to take a new one, but in general Kup tries to not disturb you needlessly.

Only the small parts of your files that has actually changed since last backup will be saved and therefore incremental backups are very cheap. This is especially useful if you are working on big files.
At the same time it's as easy to access your files as if a complete backup was taken every time. Every backup contains a complete version of your directories, behind the scenes all the content that is actually the same is only stored once. To make this happen Kup runs the backup program "bup" in the background, look at https://github.com/bup/bup for details.

What the Kup backup system consists of

Configuration module, available in your system settings. Here you can configure backup plans, what to include, where to backup to and how often. You can also see the status for these backup plans to monitor if you're running low on disk space, etc.

A small program running in the background. It will monitor to see when your backup destination is available, schedule and run your backup plans. It has a system tray icon that shows up when a backup destination is available.

Current features

backup destinations:
- local filesystem, monitored for availability. That means you can set a destination folder which only exist when perhaps a network shared drive is mounted and Kup will detect when it becomes available.
- external storage, like usb hard drives. Also monitored for availability.

schedules:
- manual only (triggered from tray icon popup menu)
- interval (suggests new backup after some time has passed since last backup)
- usage based (suggests new backup after you have been active on your computer for some hours since last backup).

helping you mount and unmount the backup archive so you can easily access archived files.

Installation
Requires bup to be installed, also install python-fuse to be able to easily see and restore files from your
backups. Follow instructions in README file for compiling Kup.
Note that kup installs a policykit file that by default will let any user run the bup commands as root.

Source code:
Development happens at:
https://github.com/spersson/Kup

If you do test new features that are not in a released version yet, please let me know if it works or not. This project is still small enough that it is very useful to get feedback on any testing done.

TODO:
- SSH as backup destination. Would be easy to add but I have not been motivated yet.
- KIO slave to see a bup archive in a file manager, could be based on libgit2 instead of fuse-mount.
Also could be nice to have a view here where each file is represented as a directory and under
that is the different timestamps of that file, would make it easier to find earlier versions of files.
- Continous backups: monitoring the local filesystem for changes and imediately backing up
the changed file if destination is available.
- Make bup give out percentage complete and use this to present completion in systray tooltip.

Kup Version 0.3.2
2013-05-20:
- Add german, italian and tagalog translations.
- Make it more difficult to create a backup plan without a destination. (Select first usb drive automatically when connected, warn user if no drive is selected when saving)

Kup Version 0.3.1
2013-03-09:
- Fix running with older versions of bup by removing compression level option, not useful for most people anyway.
- Check if bup is installed, notify user if not.
- Add spanish translation.

Kup Version 0.3
2013-02-20:
- Adds an option to take the backup as root. Useful when you want to backup system files which needs root access to read.
- Now checks if you are inactive (no mouse or keyboard activity) when accumulating usage time. For instance, Kup will no longer count time watching a movie on your computer as active usage time.
- Adds ability to configure which compression level is used for backups.
- Adds the option of selecting/deselecting hidden folders.
- Adds infrastructure for translations and a swedish translation. Help with other languages would be appreciated!
- Now sets the CPU and (on linux) the IO scheduler priority of the backup processes to be very nice, just to minimize risk of a running backup disturbing you.
- Fixes a couple of bugs in the folder selection tree.
- Shows more info about external drives connected and now also remembers more info about the drive you have selected.
- Now uses the bup index file in your home directory instead of having the index file located in the destination archive. This can perhaps give better performance in some scenarios, not tested.
- Adds a few hidden folders in your home directory as default excludes, should be useful for most people.

Kup Version 0.2
2012-02-13:
- Introduced a new scheduling mode, Usage. Monitors how long you've been logged in since last backup was taken and suggests new backup after configured number of hours. Made this scheduling mode the default.
- Made a new systray icon (supposed to look like a safe... you judge..).
- The progress notification thing was just ugly & annoying, removed it. Now just showing an animated icon when taking a backup.
- Added option to never ask user before starting to take a new backup.
- Improved error reporting
- Big code cleanup for more maintainable code
- Made the config module's way of detecting/starting the daemon process more reliable.
- Systray icon tooltip now contains info on backup plan status.
- Systray icon now shows up with a red warning symbol if a plan has "bad" status; more than three times the backup interval has passed since last backup.
- Bug fix, already plugged in devices didn't show up in the list for selecting external destination drive.
- Bug fix for local filesystem destination: now detects if destination folder becomes available after a mount.

Kup Version 0.1
2011-12-09:
- Initial release.