Cedar Backup v3

What is Cedar Backup?

Cedar Backup v3 is a software package designed to manage system backups for a pool of local and remote machines. The project was originally maintained at SourceForge, and historical releases still exist there. The project was moved to BitBucket in mid-2015, and from there to GitHub in mid-2019 when BitBucket retired their Mercurial hosting service.

Cedar Backup understands how to back up filesystem data as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and Subversion repositories. It can also be easily extended to support other kinds of data sources. The backup process is focused around weekly backups to a single CD or DVD disc, with the expectation that the disc will be changed or overwritten at the beginning of each week. Alternately, Cedar Backup can write your backups to the Amazon S3 cloud rather than relying on physical media.

Besides offering command-line utilities to manage the backup process, Cedar Backup provides a well-organized library of backup-related functionality, written in the Python 3 programming language.

There are many different backup software systems in the open source world. Cedar Backup aims to fill a niche: it aims to be a good fit for people who need to back up a limited amount of important data on a regular basis. Cedar Backup isn’t for you if you want to back up your huge MP3 collection every night, or if you want to back up a few hundred machines. However, if you administer a small set of machines and you want to run daily incremental backups for things like system configuration, current email, small web sites, source code repositories, or small databases, then Cedar Backup is probably worth your time.

Cedar Backup has been developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and is primarily supported on Debian and other Linux systems. However, since it is written in portable Python 3, it should run without problems on just about any UNIX-like operating system. In particular, full Cedar Backup functionality is known to work on Debian and SuSE Linux, and client functionality is also known to work on FreeBSD and OS X systems.

Supported Python Versions

My general policy is to support the latest four versions of the Python interpreter. For example, starting in late 2023, I dropped support for Python 3.8, leaving support for Python 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12. At my discretion, I may choose to support older versions, as long as doing so doesn't cause too much pain. These days Python is released about once per year, so most anyone should be able to run one of the supported versions, even on a long-term support Linux distribution.

Developer Documentation

Developer documentation is found in DEVELOPER.md. See that file for notes about how the code is structured, how to set up a development environment, etc.

End User Documentation

See the Changelog for recent changes.

The Cedar Backup v3 Software Manual documents the process of setting up and using Cedar Backup. In the manual, you can find information about how Cedar Backup works, how to install and configure it, how to schedule backups, how to restore data, and how to get support.

Library Code

The Cedar Backup v3 has been designed as both an application and a library of backup-related functionality. The CedarBackup3 Python package contains a variety of useful backup-related classes and functions. For instance: the IsoImage class represents an ISO CD image; the CdWriter class represents a CD-R/CD-RW writer device; and the FilesystemList class represents a list of files and directories on a filesystem. For more information, see the API Reference documentation.

Package Distributions

Cedar Backup is primarily distributed as a Python 3 package. You can install it from PyPI using pip:

$ pip install cedar-backup3

In addition to the Python package, Cedar Backup requires a variety of external system dependencies. For more information, see the Cedar Backup v3 Software Manual.

Debian packages for Cedar Backup v3, called cedar-backup3 and cedar-backup3-doc, were first available starting with the Debian 'stretch' release. Debian derivatives (such as Ubuntu) should also contain the packages.