Dirvish

When I first found out about the "hard link" option for recent releases of rsync, I got very excited, and soon discovered Dirvish, which was good enough.

Almost.

• Dirvish has a rigid (but user definable) timeschedule for backups. If your backup server ever goes down, your backups have to restarted manually, a process which can take hours. (with the "--init" option) It won't just pick up where it left off.
• It's complicated. Lots of rules, and trying to make heads or tails of the "Expire rules" option is quite painful.
• I found the documentation confusing and convoluted. Options not well explained.
• The maintainer of the project was very unpleasant when I gave him some changes to the documentation.
• Dirvish can't gracefully handle or detect a full backup hard disk. NASTY errors get spit out left and right!

The other option I found requires a custom-patched rsync client. (ugh) While this does enhance security, it certainly doesn't make it easy, which is the primary goal of this project.

rdiff-backup

Since writing TIN backupbuddy, and getting feedback from users and potential users, I've come across a number of other backup options. The first I'll discuss is rdiff-backup.

Rdiff-backup uses python instead of PHP. Otherwise, it's very similar to backup-buddy. I don't know how easy or configurable it is, compared to BackupBuddy.

BackupPC

BackupPC is the project I was looking for when I wrote Backup Buddy. If I didn't already write, setup, and start using BackupBuddy, I would have used BackupPC, and this is the only project I'd consider switching to from Backup Buddy.