Prebackup

Organize your directories before a backup

Prebackup is not a backup program, but a tool you use before your actual backup, to better organize your directories and set what will and will not end up in your backup.

Usually when you backup your home or a portion of it, many files are included that don't need a backup, especially large files like videos, ISO installation images, installed games, etc.

Prebackup lets you fine-tune the list of directories and exclusions in several ways:

• Scan a "snapshot" of the directories you want to backup, with information on the size of each directory and subdirectory
• Set directories to be excluded and rescan a new snapshot (* see note)
• Save a snapshot for future reference
• Compare the current snapshot with a previously saved one, to check if and where abnormal increases in size have been introduced since the last backup, and possibly exclude new directories
• Generate output files to be used by your backup program, like a list of excluded directories

* Note: currently directories are considered to be excluded if they contain a file with a given name, see full documentation for details.

Installation

The program currently works on GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems. It's written with Qt toolkit, so provided you have all the Qt development libraries and headers installed, there are two ways to compile it:

• From command-line, go to the prebackup subdirectory where the prebackup.pro file is, and run qmake and then make
• Or using the Qt Creator IDE, open the project by opening the prebackup.pro file, then build and run

(Other libraries needed: sqlite3)

Usage

See the Wiki page on GitHub: https://github.com/malessandrini/prebackup/wiki or click Help -> Documentation in the program.

License

Prebackup Copyright (C) 2017 Michele Alessandrini

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.