Cedar Backup is a software package designed to manage system backups for a pool of local and remote machines. Cedar Backup understands how to back up filesystem data as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and Subversion repositories. It can also be easily extended to support other kinds of data sources.

Cedar Backup is focused around weekly backups to a single CD or DVD disc, with the expectation that the disc will be changed or overwritten at the beginning of each week. If your hardware is new enough (and almost all hardware is today), Cedar Backup can write multisession discs, allowing you to add incremental data to a disc on a daily basis.

Besides offering command-line utilities to manage the backup process, Cedar Backup provides a well-organized library of backup-related functionality, written in the Python programming language.

There are many different backup software implementations out there in the free software and open source world. Cedar Backup aims to fill a niche: it aims to be a good fit for people who need to back up a limited amount of important data to CD or DVD on a regular basis. Cedar Backup isn't for you if you want to back up your MP3 collection every night, or if you want to back up a few hundred machines. However, if you administer a small set machines and you want to run daily incremental backups for things like system configuration, current email, small web sites, a CVS or Subversion repository, or a small MySQL database, then Cedar Backup is probably worth your time.

Cedar Backup has been developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and is primarily supported on Debian and other Linux systems. However, since it is written in portable Python, it should run without problems on just about any UNIX-like operating system. In particular, full Cedar Backup functionality is known to work on Debian and SuSE Linux systems, and client functionality is also known to work on FreeBSD and Mac OS X systems.

To run a Cedar Backup client, you really just need a working Python installation. To run a Cedar Backup master, you will also need a set of other executables, most of which are related to building and writing CD/DVD images. A full list of dependencies is provided in the section called “Installing Dependencies”.