[[!tag obnam announcement]]

I have just released version 1.9 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian. Due to the freeze of Debian for the jessie release, I've not uploaded this version to Debian yet (not experimental and not backports).

This is the first Obnam release since May 13, 2014, 313 days ago. That's a long time. I make no excuses: Obnam is a hobby project, which I work on when I have the time and energy. The past year has been very /interesting/ year for me, in all sorts of stressful ways: I've changed jobs, moved to another country, and dealt with the loss of a close relative. Because of this, I've not been able to spend as much time on Obnam as I'd like.

The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what has happened to Obnam during this time. There's been a lot of things, actually.

My plans for Obnam next are mainly centered around performance. This will require developing a new repository format, to allow things that are not possible with the current format. For example, the current format stores each data chunk in its own file in the repository, and that is quite wasteful when live data files (and therefore their chunks) are quite small.

As preparation for this work, the silly-looking "simple" format has been added, mostly to make sure the internal code infrastructure is ready to support multiple repository formats in the same Obnam version.

Those interested in discussing ways to make Obnam fast should join the obnam-dev mailing list.

Version 1.9, released 2015-03-22

New features:

  • James Vasile changed Obnam so it can backup an individual file, instead of an entire directory.

  • James Vasile added the --include option to Obnam, allowing one to include files that would otherwise be excluded (see --exclude).

  • Carlo Teubner changed obnam fsck to remove unused chunks, if the --fsck-fix or --fsck-rm-unused settings are used. He also made it not check for unused chunks when it's useless to do so, because of various --fsck-skip settings are used.

  • A start of a French translation of the manual by pedrito2.

  • Ian Cambell provided a new Obnam command, obnam kdirstat, which makes the KDE k4dirstat utility be able to show graphically which parts of a backup generation use most space.

  • Lars Wirzenius added the simple repository format, which is for demonstration only. It is much too simplistic to be used for real.

Minor changes:

  • The manual page and obnam --help are now clearer that the --root setting and command line arguments to obnam backup can be SFTP URLs. Thanks to Simone Piccardi for reporting the issue.

  • David Fries filled in the displayed file permission mode bits.

  • Grammar and typo fixes for the obnam.1 manual page, from Jean Jordaan.

  • Tom Chiverton suggested a clarification to the manual page for "obnam mount" to say that each generation is a subdirectory.

  • David Fries changed restore to set the group ownership if possible even when not root. No warnings are issued if the attempt fails.

  • Jan Niggemann added a little to the German translation of the Obnam manual.

  • Lars Wirzenius added the path to the error message about a missing chunk (R43272X).

  • Lars Wirzenius made the message at the end of a backup report more statistics about transfers during the backup.

Bug fixes:

  • The Obnam SFTP plugin would loop infinitely if it lost the connection to the SSH server while creating a temporary file. Itamar Turner-Trauring provided a fix for this.

  • Will Dyson fixed a bug about locking while removing checkpoint generations.

  • Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a Python 2.6 compatibility problem in the unit tests (use of assertRaises as a context manager).

  • Lars Kruse fixed a bug with backing up of overlapping backup roots (e.g., / and /boot), given a test case by Adrien Clerc.

  • Thomas Eschenbacher fixed a bug in the format 6 repository code that would crash when there is an obscure problem and a B-tree code can't be found in the tree.

  • Tom Chiverton pointed out that the manual page was using "obnam restore" instead of "obnam mount" in an example for "obnam mount".

  • The yarn test suite now runs FUSE tests (obnam mount) when fusermount is available, rather than checking for membership in the group fuse. The latter is a Debianism (fixed in Debian jessie).

  • Thomas Waldmann noticed that obnam verify didn't notice that a file had new data, when the modification time was the same. Obnam now notices this.

  • Thomas Waldmann fixed many typos and minor bugs in the source code.

  • Laurence Perkins reported that the Tahoe-LAFS SFTP server returned some stat fields as None. Fixed to change those to be 0 instead.

  • Lars Wirzenius fixed double-downloading of chunks during restores.