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Mabumbi backup

The way it works

Mabumbi consits of 3 components.

First and by far the most important is storeBackup. Storebackup is an application that does an excelent job for backups preserving the history. Get more information on storeBackup on it's homepage.

The second component is the daemon. This daemon is "controlling" storeBackup. I'm using this daemon, as the daemon is running as a system wide daemon. Therefore it runs with high privileges and can store any data (not just a single user's one).

Third component is the GUI. Very important is the system tray, as the user can see when as backup is running/ide, the USB-drive is not connected, start a backup directly or open the backup directory (for restore).
A GUI for more status information and configurations.
Although Mabumbi is heavily influenced by Time Machine, the fancy GUI is not what I want to clone (for now). It's much more the ease of use (plug in an USB-drive, click "use it as backup", and se it makeing backups every hour). And Mabumbi shall inform you, when you last backup is a while back - like 30 days (and you should start a new one by plugging in the USB-drive).

The GUI and the daemon are communicating using DBUS.

Use cases

Initialisation

Connect your USB-disk. Mabumbi asks you if you want to use it as backup-drive. Mabumbi configures the backup (maybe asking you some questions). The first backup starts (and takes a long long time).

Periodic updates

You leave your harddisk connected. Mabumbi starts updates periodically (every hour for example). The time a backup is running (should take a few minutes only), can be seen in the systemtray (a bad time to disconnect the disk).

Backups from time to time

Get your backup-drive out of the chest, and connect it to the PC. Then click "Start Backup" in Mabumbi. The time a backup is running and finished, can be seen in the systemtray (this is very importand for my father ;-) ). When finished, the disk is disconnected and put savely to the chest again.

You forgot your backup

Mabumbi detects that you didn't do a backup for a while (for example 30 days). A message is shown to remind you that you should run a backup again.

Restore a backup

Restoring is done by opening the backup directory with your filemanager (may be improved in the future).