Cross-Platform Backup Solution?

[djroze]

Hey there,

I am considering starting on a new (probably open-source) cross-platform backup solution to meet my needs as mentioned here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=516812. I was curious though, how many people would find a program like this useful or not? If I'm the only one who would use something like this, I'll probably not put in the time to write it and just use different programs on Windows and Linux, but if it's something people would generally appreciate, I think it would be a neat project to start. Let me know what you think - thanks in advance!

- DJ

PS: Sorry if this isn't the right forum, but I didn't quite see a place for prospective third-party projects...please feel free to move it if there's somewhere better. :)

[bash]

I would find something like that very useful. Make it straightforward as possible. I knew quite a few not so techy people using either Windows or Ubuntu and it would really be usefull if we had a good backup application that would do backups on both and let you shedule backups at certain times so that these people don't have to worry about it.

Also you could add encryption for the backups. I don't know of any other backup solution in Linux that offers this. Thats what Im atm moment missing. I guess a good start to look at would be simple backup for Linux.

[djroze]

Thanks for the input. I think the mechanics of performing the backups will be simple enough, but as you mentioned, the user interface will be difficult to do elegantly; the primary reason for this, in my opinion, is that files are specified differently between Windows and Unix. How would you envision a non-computer-saavy person specifying which files to back up? Say, for example, I wanted to back up "my documents"; would I just type in the two paths, one relative to Windows and one relative to Linux?