[[!tag obnam]]

I have released version 0.18 of Obnam, my backup application. From the NEWS file:

  • The repository format has again changed in an incompatible manner, so you will need to re-backup everything again. (If this is a problem, tell me, and I'll consider adding backwards compatibility before 1.0 is released.)
  • New option --exclude-caches allows automatic exclusion of cache directories that are marked as such.
  • Obnam now makes files in the repository be read-only, so that they're that much harder to delete by mistake.
  • Error message about files that can't be backed up now mentions the correct file.
  • Bugfix: unreadable files and directories no longer cause the backup to fail. The problems are reported, but the backup continues. Thanks to Jeff Epler for reporting the bug.
  • Speed improvement from Jeff Epler for excluding files from backups.
  • Various other speed improvements.
  • Bugfix: restoring symlinks now works even if the symlink is restored before its target. Also, the permissions of the symlink (rather than its target) are now restored correctly. Thanks to Jeff Epler for an exemplary bug report.
  • New option --one-file-system, from Jeff Epler.
  • New benchmarking tool obnam-benchmark, which is more flexible than the old run-benchmark.
  • When encrypting/decrypting data with GnuPG, temporary files are no longer used.
  • When verifying, .../foo and .../foo/ now work the same way.
  • New option --symmetric-key-bits.
  • The chunk directory uses more hierarchy levels, and the way chunks are stored there is now user-configurable (but you'll get into trouble if you don't always use the same configuration). This should speed things up a bit once the number of chunks grows very large.
  • New --chunkids-per-group option, for yet more knobs to tweak when searching for optimal performance.
  • Local files are now opened using O_NOATIME so they can be backed up without affecting timestamps.
  • Now uses the cliapp framework for writing command line applications. The primary user-visible effect is that the manpage now has an accurate list of options.
  • Bugfix: Obnam now again reports VFS I/O statistics.
  • Bugfix: Obnam can again back up live data that is accessed using sftp. Thanks to Tapani Tarvainen for reporting the problem.

I alse made releases of some dependencies of Obnam. They're all in my code.liw.fi repository, and some of them are also now in Debian unstable.