Copyright (c) 2002-2008 by Heinz-Josef Claes (see README)
Published under the GNU General Public License v3 or any later version


Instead of reading the documentation submitted in the distribution of
storeBackup itself, you should read the much more detailed documentation at:

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/storebackup
http://www.nongnu.org/storebackup/

or download the corresponding pdf file from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/storebackup/

New releases are announced at
http://freshmeat.net/projects/storebackup


--------------------------------------------------------
For the changes see ChangLog.

This release (2.0) has some substantial changes. For a very short description,
read the ChangeLog.

To make a simple Backup, do the following:
unpack the tar file, mkdir a directory for the backup, eg. /my-backups,
which should be a different disk than /etc.

Then start as root:

# <path>/storeBackup.pl --sourceDir /etc --backupDir /my-backups --series .

--sourceDir  the directory you wish to backup
--backupDir  The directory that is the basis for all your backups.
	     This can not be / (e.g. /my-backups)
--series     the directory of this specific backup inside of the
	     'topLevel' directory. e.g. personal will make the backup to
	     be in /my-backups/personal if topeLevel is /my-backups.
 	     If this is not needed, use a '.' (dot)
	     The default value is 'default'.

The above command will backup '/etc' to '/my-backups/.'
It will take a while, because it is the first backup and some files have
to be compressed.  If you look into '/my-backups/.', you will see all the
files from '/etc' there - but compressed in a directory named after the
date and time.

You can also start it as a 'normal' user, but then you can only save files
you are allowed to read (not /etc) to place where you have write access.

Repeat the command above.
This backups runs much faster. When you look into one of the backups with
# ls -l
you will see eg:
-rw-r--r--   2 root root   890 Jun  4 17:53 hosts.bz2
             ^                                     ^
     it is hard linked                      it is compressed
This means, that this (compressed file) exists only one time on your disk,
but is present in both backups.


You can use version 2.0 with no limitations together with your existing
backups from version 1.19. But after switching to 2.0, you should not use
1.19 any more if used the option 'lateLinks'!

StoreBackup is a piece of software with powerfull options for the configuration.
For additional information, there is a README file which you should read ;-) .
More examples are in the EXAMPLES file. (I recommend to read the html or
pdf documention, see the beginning of this file.)


---
Some more explanations to --backupDir and --series.

Think you make backups from 3 different computers to a (nfs) server.
You backup directory on the server is:
/my-backups

The you create three different directories for the backups of you
computers below this directory (one for each computer):
/my-backups/computer1
/my-backups/computer2
/my-backups/computer3

Now assume, that the backups are mounted with the same names on your
three computers.
If you make a backup from computer 1, you will configure:
... --backupDir /my-backups --series computer1

If you make a backup from computer 2, you will configure:
... --backupDir /my-backups --series computer2

and so on. The parameter to backupDir shows the place, where all your
backups reside, series describes where at this place the individual
backup series are located.


-------------------------------------- old stuff ----------------------
see README if you upgrade from 1.15.1 or an older version.
