Chunky Backup - Beta 2
Chunky Backup is a little utility I made to serve a specific purpose of mine...I feared the wrath of my wife if
some stupid disk error once again caused our mp3 collection to disappear. And being lazy about doing the
back up thing, as I really hate going through and making a cd-r sized lump of mp3s, then doing it over and over
until all files are safely on cds, I decided to learn a programming language and make something to do it for me.
Although it seems like much more work than just doing it by hand, coding actually turned out to be rather fun.
Details
Chunky Backup was coded entirely in Python using the Bethon Be API bindings.
It is my first real, useful app, so I initially had simple focus. My original goal was to make an app that would:
- Take a dropped folder as input
- Chop the contents into cd-r sized "chunks"
- Allow you to view the contents of those chunks
- Let you burn the chunks to a cd or series thereof
I succeeded in all of those points, and added functionality beyond the original plan, including:
- The ability to define the cd naming scheme (ie: MyMp3s, where the cds would be MyMp3s_1,MyMp3s_2, etc)
- Cd size selection: 650 or 700 megs chunks
Now supports BFS cd burning
In discussing my project on beshare, many people offered suggestions, many of which I plan on implementing
Some future additions will/may include
- The creation of an index, both on the HD and cd, and a searching system to allow for quick "where is X file"
- Tagging files that have gone through Chunky Backup with some attribute, so next time the folder is dropped, those files
will be skipped, if unchanged.
- Compression
- And of course any tweaks, bug fixes, etc...as needed
Download - version .0.8.9a
This version is most likely the one you'll grab. It has the required libs with it. Unless you have Python and Bethon installed already,
this is what you need.
or
If you already have Python and Bethon installed, grab this.
Instructions
To run Chunky Backup, you will need to have cdrtools installed. Get it at BeBits.
Chunky Backup defaults to 650 meg chunk sizes. If you want 700, open the prefs BEFORE dropping a folder and make that change.
Then you can drop a folder on it. Chunk Backup will not follow links or accept folders on non-BFS partitions!
Depending on the number of files in the dropped folder, the process of chunking a folder will take from a few seconds, to quite a while.
From that point you go to the Burn Chunks tab, set you cd-r device and hit Burn.
While it is burning, the main inteface becomes, umm, locked looking...I am working on that too..If you want to see whats going
on, run Chunky Backup from the terminal and watch in there.
Bethon and Python
If you are interested in coding apps for BeOS, but think you can't, it's not as difficult as it at first seems. Python is a wonderfully
easy language to learn and doing beos GUI apps with bethon is a breeze. I HIGHLY recommend getting one of the Python
distributions on BeBits...one with bethon included...and seeing what you can do. I will post some example code on here inthe near
future, as well as some general tips for translating Be Book info into Python.
Feedback rules!!
