The first time that you attempt to do something, it’s pretty much a guarantee that it’s going to suck.  This doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing.  Shows like  America’s Funniest Home Videos and MXC have found dozens of way to cash in on the humiliation of their participants.  (And what better exemplifies pure suck than a golf ball to the groin?)

It, therefore, shouldn’t come as any surprise that creative pursuits are no exception to the general rule of suckiness.  After all, you have to overcome inexperience and ineptitude to produce anything.  The only way to ensure that a release doesn’t suck is to finish a first draft and revise heavily.  Which requires a great deal of work.

Yet … as interesting as that might be, this isn’t a post about the creative process.  It’s about Time Drive and I should probably admit that Time Drive 0.1 had a few … rough … edges.  Sure, it mostly worked, but it was new software and did too many strange things to declare anything other than a “work in progress.”  But Time Drive 0.1 was a first release and first releases suck.

Second releases, however, offer a chance to clean things up, refine the bleeding edge, and otherwise deliver the goods.  Maybe that’s why I’m so excited to announce the release of Time Drive 0.2.  This version of Time Drive is a great improvement over it’s predecessor.  So much so that Time Drive 0.2 is hereby dubbed the “More S” release: more stable, more secure, more settings, and Amazon S3 storage.

In the remainder of this post, I’ll attempt to justify such a silly name by taking a look at a few of those new features.

More Stable and Secure

First up, I should probably say something about the program’s stability and security. But before doing that …

Isn’t it a bit ironic that stability and security have become major selling points?  Go ahead and look at the advertising for any major piece of software.  References to stability and security – or their closely related siblings, reliability and refinement – will feature prominently.

As an example, let’s analyze the promotional materials for the most recent release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard.  In the banner advertisement below, stability and reliability form the cornerstone of the brainwashing message: “Refinements, your Mac gets faster and easier to use.”  And in the text, we catch all the buzzwords: simplicity, reliability, security, speed.  In short, they’ve attempted to make make old things new by refining them.

Time Drive has gone through a similar type of rewrite.  With the generous help of Philippe Delodder, all of the core classes have been reformulated and reorganized: they’re new again.  The end result is that all things are improved, spiffed and otherwise sped up.  In short, Time Drive no longer resembles a prototype as much as a proper foundation upon which to grow.

More Settings

And nowhere is this more apparent than in the new advanced settings dialog.  In version 0.1 Time Drive handled all the important things that a backup program should.  It was easy to specify which folders you wanted to backup and where the  archive was to be stored.  But that was about it.

The first version didn’t let you fully use the power of Duplicity to specify what you considered important.  What if you didn’t want to backup hidden files or settings?  Or what if you wanted your work files to be stored in a different location than your home files?  Or what if you want to create a new backup every couple of months?

Time Drive 0.2 gives you that degree of control without losing the simplicity.  Just like before, you get started by telling the program where you want to store the archive and which folders to include.  If that’s all you need, then you’re done.  Click “Ok” and let Time Drive do it’s thing.

But why settle for simple when you can micromanage?  Need to refine the settings for an individual folder, highlight it from the list and press the “Advanced” button.  From there, you have easy access to things you don’t want included in the backup, fine control over where it gets kept, and even the ability to remotely manage the backup sets.

What You Exclude Can Be as Important as What You Include.  Despite the fact that we should keep redundant copies of our data, sometimes there are things you just aren’t worried about.  For example, you might be a Python developer and want to use Time Drive to backup your source code.  The source code is important, but whenever a python script gets run, the python interpreter creates a compiled file (“.pyc”). These files are necessary for the code to run, but they don’t contain any valuable or new information.  They just take up space.  So, let’s leave them out them by adding “.pyc” to the exclude list.  Just press the “Add” button and type the offending characters into the message box.  Want to leave “.pyc” files out of all of your backups?  You can do that too from the main exclude list.

Different Storage Locations.  Now, what if you want your work related backups to be kept on your company’s ftp server instead of your local hard?  Time Drive has you covered there as well.  Just click on the “Archive Settings” tab and tell Time Drive where you want the folder’s archive to live.  You can even specify a folder specific encryption key should you so choose.

Manage Your Backup Sets.  Perhaps the only downside of creating frequent and redundant backups is that old files might take up needed hard drive space.  Sure, managing backup sets by hands is possible … but who wants to do that?  Time Drive 0.2 makes it easy to delete your old backup sets when they’re no longer needed, thereby saving valuable hard drive space.

Amazon S3 Storage

Which finally brings me to the biggest new addition to Time Drive, support for Amazon S3: a reliable, simple and inexpensive way to save your files over the internet.  When it appeared a few years ago, S3 introduced a radically new idea: only pay for the storage you actually use.  At the time, other providers charged a flat rate for a set amount of storage, regardless of whether you needed it or not.  While prices ran the gamut of reasonable to outrageous, you were still paying for something that you might not be using.

Using S3, however, it is possible to have offsite and redundant backups while knowing that you are only getting charged for what you use.  Moreover, the rates are quite reasonable, about 0.15 cents per gibabyte of data per month.  For example, I currently keep all of my source code files and pictures backed up through Time Drive.  In total, it amounts to about 15 GB of space.  Amazon charges me about $2.25 a month for the space, which is substantially less than any other provider I’ve been able to find.  Sure, there are plans that are slightly more expensive and provide more space; but that’s just it, I don’t need that additional space.  I’m probably not going to use it.  Which makes Amazon a really good fit for my needs.  It’s cheap, it’s convenient and it’s available everywhere.  Most importantly though, it’s offsite, so I’m prepared in case some sort of disaster does strike.  And Time Drive works with it seamlessly.

Conclusion

In summary, I think that Time Drive handily earns it’s “More S” label.  It’s a big improvement over the previous version and steps up the stability, the number of settings, and the types of storage backends that it works with.  But it still remains elegant and easy to use.  In short, it’s one step closer to the overall goal of “Backup Done Right.”

Head on over to the project’s home page and check it out.

Similar Posts:

• Backup for Linux, Done Right – Part 2: Time Drive 0.1
• Upgrading from Time Drive 0.1
• Installing Duplicity on Mac OS X
• Backup, Sync and Share – Part 5.2: Windows Vista Backup (Disaster Prevention)
• Reclaiming Free Space from a Time Machine Backup

Tags: Backup,Linux Backup,Mac OS X,Time Drive
Categories: Computer, Programming
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