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Every once in a while you read on a random Internet forum of a poor soul complaining that program XYZ eat his data for lunch. Invariably, there is someone there to ask: "You do keep regular backups, don't you?". You can almost see the smirk on their faces when they ask this irrelevant question, knowing full well that most likely the person did not do any regular backups.
Truth of the matter is that most people don't do regular backups, yet few people admit to it. Skipping this essential step of protecting such a valuable asset seems reckless or lazy at best, and that doesn't sit well with most folks.
Why do people have such a difficult time understanding the need for implementing such a simple and basic procedure that can save them from untold grief? I used to blame the people as lazy, until I realized I didn't keep regular backups! In fact, I come to realize that it is not such a simple and basic procedure after all. Shouldn't it be?
Soon after setting up shop as a Linux company, we faced the unavoidable task of backing up our data. More importantly, our clients that deployed Linux based systems needed a backup solution. We figured that this was a "solved" problem, so we took a quick look around for something that would satisfy our quite reasonable requirements:
It turns out that the offer is a little underwhelming. The only one that came reasonably close to what we needed was rdiff-backup, but that needed work to do what we needed it to do. And so we went ahead and did the work for our own internal purposes.
The end result of our efforts is SafeKeep. We decided to free the code in the hope that others will find it useful. If you do, please send us your impressions and suggestions at safekeep-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.