Ruby Backup Bouncer (RBB)

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What is it?

RBB was born as a porting in Ruby of the famous Backup Bouncer test suite for Mac OS X originally written by Nathaniel Gray and available at http://www.n8gray.org/code/backup-bouncer/. That is, RBB is a suite of tests to evaluate how good (or bad) various backup tools are in backing up OS X metadata. It comes with pre-defined backup tests for various programs (cp, ditto, rsync, asr, the Finder, etc…), but it can be used to test any backup software.

RBB improves over the original Backup Bouncer by providing more copy tasks, more test cases, more output formats, and a more convenient way to manage different tasks from the command-line through Rake. RBB includes the original tests by N. Gray (with modifications by Carbon Copy Cloner's author) as a legacy test case.

Requirements

• XCode Developer Tools (for SetFile and GetFileInfo);
• Ruby 1.8.7 or later;
• a few additional Ruby gems: bundler (optional, to make it easier to install all the needed dependencies), rake, rdoc (optional, for generating the documentation), minitest, plist, ansi and turn;
• familiarity with the command-line.

RBB has been tested on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion). It should work under previous versions of the OS, but that is untested.

Installation

The best way to install the required gems is to use Bundler. To install bundler:

gem install bundler

Depending on your system configuration, you may need to run the above commands with sudo. That is certainly the case if you are using the version of Ruby that comes with OS X. If you use rbenv or rvm, then you should probably run the above command without sudo.

All the dependencies can be installed inside the vendor subdirectory with

bundle install

This command must always be run without sudo!

Getting Started

Tasks are run using rake.

You should never run rake with sudo. This is important for tests to behave properly. When administrator privileges are needed to carry out a task, RBB asks you to type an administrator password.

The simplest way to run the test suite is by executing

rake autoclone

or

rake autocopy

Both tasks will create and mount a disk image called srcvol, fill it with test data, copy the data with every enabled copier and verify the copy by running all the enabled test cases.

The difference between the two tasks is that the first will create a new target volume for each copy task, while the second will copy the data into subfolders of ./tmp. Note that some copy tasks (for example, asr or dd) can only clone the source volume into a new volume and cannot copy the source data into a folder, so they will be silently ignored by rake autocopy.

To remove the generated files, use

rake clean

The above command will leave the source volume (srcvol) intact. To clean really everything you may run the more aggressive

rake clobber

For a list of the available tasks, use rake -T. A detailed description of a task can be obtained with rake -D <task name>.

Other Examples

• Disable all copiers, enable ditto, create a volume, fill it with data, clone it and verify the copy made by ditto:

    rake dis[copiers]
    rake en[ditto]
    rake mkvol
    rake fill
    rake clone
    rake verify dst=/Volumes/ditto