FAQ

How stable/reliable is osbx?

As reliable as the author expects from a backup software - the author uses it for practically all local backups.

That also means there should be no "gotchas" when you use osbx with any combination of flags/options for all commands.

Is osbx compatible with the official SeqBox(denoted as official-sbx)?

Mostly yes.

TL;DR : If you stick with the default hash(SHA256), then yes.

For encoding and decoding

If file is encoded in either osbx(using default - SHA256) or official-sbx, then the resulting sbx container is fully decodable in both osbx and official-sbx.

If file is enocded in osbx using other hashes, then the final file cannot be hashed by official-sbx to check for integrity, but still decodes successfully.

Osbx employs more complicated logic for decoding and can decode sbx container with randomly ordered and/or repeated sbx blocks. Official-sbx requires the sbx container to contain only sequential and non-repeating sbx blocks to successfully decode.

For encoding and rescuing

If file is encoded in either osbx or official-sbx, then both osbx or official-sbx can rescue the file from the disk image.

Note that rescuing is a one stage process in osbx(just osbx rescue ...), while a two stage process in official-sbx(invoke sbxscan.py then sbxreco.py).

Can I make multiple copies of the sbx container?

Yes, just copy and paste into same or different folder. Both official-sbx and osbx can rescue the data out.

Can I backup only the metadata block?

This may be done under osbx via the rescue mode using the only-pick option.

You can see the recording here for the demo.

Otherwise you can just take the first 512/128/4096 bytes of the sbx container using head or similar commands, and store the extracted bytes as another file.