Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Look for Personal Backup Appliance 1.1.0 on 12/17

I've been busy working on the next release of Personal Backup Appliance. Previously, I mentioned that I would do a test release in early December, but I'm not going to do that anymore. With all the new features, it's complicated to generate a patch release that will apply nicely over 1.0.2. However, I decided on a release date for version 1.1.0. Personal Backup Appliance 1.1.0 will be released on December 17th.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Working on Personal Backup Appliance 1.1.0

I finally have some time to work on the next release of Personal Backup Appliance. I'd like to thank all of those that sent me encouraging feedback over the past few months. Expect to see some new files to be released in December sometime. Some test files in early December, and hopefully a release by the end of the year. Here's some ramblings about what I've been working on to whet your appetite.

I've been making some architectural changes to the way PBA works. In particular, I've been breaking the functionality from the monolithic script into several command line utilities. This modularization allows me to quickly add new features. For example, I can now backup and restore to a PBA server or to a locally mounted partition on the same drive using a command-line tool, depending on what switches are specified. If time allows, I will create an option in the client GUI to do serverless local partition to file backups. This feature can potentially make the PBA client a stand-alone product that could backup and restore to a mounted volume, either local or remote. In other words, a PBA server would be optional.

I've also been playing around with adding a feature to create a system rescue CD or DVD iso from a PBA backup, similar to what you would get from big computer OEMs like Dell or HP. The iso will be based on the Insert PBA client.

Finally, I intend to move the VM to Dapper Drake. I don't know if I will be able to keep the size small, so the 1.1.0 release may be larger than desired.

I might throw in multicast support also, so people using PBA in large production environments would be able to blast disk images to more than one machine over the network.

That's all for now. I have to attend to my Dapper Drake install.