[[!tag obnam]]

I have just pushed out version 0.17 of Obnam, my backup application. My personal Debian repository has binaries for squeeze in i386, amd64, and armel architectures.

A summary of the changes:

• The run-benchmark script now works with the new version of seivot. The only benchmark size is one gibibyte, for now, because Obnam's too slow to do big ones in reasonable time. As an aside, the benchmark script got rewritten in Python, so it can be made more flexible.
• Benchmarks are run using encrypted backups.
• The kernel buffer cache is dropped before each obnam run, so the benchmark result is more realistic (read: slower).
• Obnam now rotates its logs. See --log-max and --log-keep options in the manual page. The default location for the log file is now ~/.cache/obnam/obnam.log for people, and /var/log/obnam.log for root.
• Obnam now restores sparse files correctly.
• There have been some speed improvements to Obnam.
• The --repository option now has the shorter alias -r, since it gets used so often.
• obnam force-lock now merely gives an error message, instead of a Python stack trace, if the repository does not exist.
• Obnam now does not crash if files go missing during a backup, or can't be read, or there are other problems with them. It will report the problem, but then continue as if it had never heard of the file.
• Obnam now supports FIFO files (Unix sockets).
• Obnam now verifies checksums when it restores files.
• Obnam now stores the checksum for the whole file, not just the checksum for each chunk of its contents.
• Obnam's own log file is automatically excluded from backups.
• Obnam now stores and restores file timestamps to full accuracy, instead of truncating them to whole seconds.
• The format of the backup repository has changed in an incompatible way, and Obnam will now refuse to use an old repository. This means you will need to use an old version to restore from them, and need to re-backup everything. Sorry.