A Linux software tool that archives and compresses file systems, enabling easy backup, transfer, and storage.
FSArchiver is a software that is designed to provide a safe and highly flexible file-system backup/deployment tool. This software allows you to save the contents of a filesystem to a compressed archive file. Unlike tar/dar, FSArchiver also creates the file-system when it extracts the data to partitions. The archive protects the data by checksumming everything in it, and in case of corruption, you only lose the current file, not the whole archive. FSArchiver is released under the GPL-v2 license.
Other open-source file-systems tools, such as partimage, already exist. However, these tools work at the filesystem blocks level, making it impossible to restore the backup to a smaller partition. Restoring the backup to a bigger partition forces you to resize the filesystem by hand. FSArchiver is designed to be a very flexible program, allowing it to extract an archive to a smaller partition as long as there is enough space to store the data. It can also restore the data on a different file-system in case you want to convert your file-system. For instance, you can backup an ext3 file-system and restore it as a reiserfs.
FSArchiver is working at the file level, making it possible to create an archive of any unix file-system (ext3, reiserfs, xfs, ...) that the running kernel can mount with a read-write support. It preserves all the standard unix file attributes, such as permissions, timestamps, symbolic-links, hard-links, extended-attributes, as long as the kernel has support for it enabled. However, FSArchiver has several limitations. It does not support non-unix file-systems, such as fat or ntfs since these files attributes don't match the unix standards. Moreover, FSArchiver cannot preserve the attributes that are very specific to a file-system. For instance, if you create a snapshot in a btrfs volume, FSArchiver won't know anything about it.
FSArchiver is safe when it makes backups of partitions that are not mounted or mounted read-only. However, if you want to backup partitions that are in use, the best thing to do is to make an LVM snapshot of the partition using lvcreate -s, which is part of the LVM userland tools. Unfortunately, you can only make snapshots of partitions that are LVM Logical Volumes.
To protect your data against corruption, FSArchiver uses two levels of checksums. Each block of each file in the archive has a 32-bit checksum, allowing us to identify which block of your file is damaged. Once a file has been restored, the md5 checksum of the whole file is compared to the original md5. It's a 128-bit checksum, so it can detect all file corruptions. In case one file is damaged, FSArchiver will restore all the other files from the archive, so you won't lose all your data. It differs from tar.gz where the whole tar is compressed with gzip, and the data written after corruption is lost.
Other open-source file-systems tools, such as partimage, already exist. However, these tools work at the filesystem blocks level, making it impossible to restore the backup to a smaller partition. Restoring the backup to a bigger partition forces you to resize the filesystem by hand. FSArchiver is designed to be a very flexible program, allowing it to extract an archive to a smaller partition as long as there is enough space to store the data. It can also restore the data on a different file-system in case you want to convert your file-system. For instance, you can backup an ext3 file-system and restore it as a reiserfs.
FSArchiver is working at the file level, making it possible to create an archive of any unix file-system (ext3, reiserfs, xfs, ...) that the running kernel can mount with a read-write support. It preserves all the standard unix file attributes, such as permissions, timestamps, symbolic-links, hard-links, extended-attributes, as long as the kernel has support for it enabled. However, FSArchiver has several limitations. It does not support non-unix file-systems, such as fat or ntfs since these files attributes don't match the unix standards. Moreover, FSArchiver cannot preserve the attributes that are very specific to a file-system. For instance, if you create a snapshot in a btrfs volume, FSArchiver won't know anything about it.
FSArchiver is safe when it makes backups of partitions that are not mounted or mounted read-only. However, if you want to backup partitions that are in use, the best thing to do is to make an LVM snapshot of the partition using lvcreate -s, which is part of the LVM userland tools. Unfortunately, you can only make snapshots of partitions that are LVM Logical Volumes.
To protect your data against corruption, FSArchiver uses two levels of checksums. Each block of each file in the archive has a 32-bit checksum, allowing us to identify which block of your file is damaged. Once a file has been restored, the md5 checksum of the whole file is compared to the original md5. It's a 128-bit checksum, so it can detect all file corruptions. In case one file is damaged, FSArchiver will restore all the other files from the archive, so you won't lose all your data. It differs from tar.gz where the whole tar is compressed with gzip, and the data written after corruption is lost.
What's New
Version 0.6.1: N/A