Konserve - App of the Month
Also see the interview with the developer of Konserve, Florian Simnacher.
Description of Konserve by Fabrice Mous.
Konserve is a backup application for KDE. It is not released as part of the KDE distribution. You can find some packages of recent releases on the website of Konserve or when no package is available or you prefer to compile this application you can grab the source code at Sourceforge. The installation is quite straight-forward. After extracting the tarball a simple ./configure, make and make install will suffice to run Konserve.
When you start Konserve for the first time it will show the Tip of the Day. After reading (yes try that for once) and closing this dialog a Konserve icon (a small can) will appear in the system tray. Clicking on this icon which will show a menu.
Konserve has a nice wizard which can help you set up your back up jobs. In this example we will use the wizard which you can find by clicking the can icon and choosing Wizard.
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You start by giving a name for the backup profile. In this example I fill in the name mail-backup as Backup Profile identifier.
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Next you need to select a file or directory it should backup. As the wizard already states it will make recursive backups of directories. In our example we will back up the directory /home/fab/Mail.
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Here you need to determine the location of your backups. In this example we use the directory backups as the location to store our backups but you can use any directory for which you have write access (typically /home/yourname/). We should mention that Konserve will create a new backup file fore every job with a unique filename so no backups get overwritten. More about that later.
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Konserve let's you specify the interval of your backups. Use the combobox to choose between days, hours, minutes and even seconds. When you check the checkbox Backup active it will make the current Backup Profile active.
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The final step in the wizard will show you all the selections you have made. When you are not satisfied with the current settings you can go back by using the Back button.
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Konserve will provide a unique name for each job which has the format directoryname-yyyyMMddhhhhmmss. So in this example a backup file would have a name like Mail-20040610224901.tar.gz.
When you don't want to use the wizard than Konserve can provide you with just one single dialog which you can use the fill in all the required
options. You can access that dialog by clicking on the can icon and choose Preferences.
Here you can fill in a Backup profile identifier 
and then click the Add 
button.
Fill in the Source url 
(what do you want to backup) and the Backup url 
(where do you want to store your backup). Last but not least provide a time interval 
and choose whether the Backup Profile should be active 
.
When you are finished click the Apply 
button.
Konserve makes handling backups really easy for people who don't want to resort to the commandline. Simple backups are made in a few steps and this shows the true power of Konserve. Enjoy Konserve.
Also see the interview with the developer of Konserve, Florian Simnacher.
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