Since releasing Déjà Dup 1.0, I’ve been hard at work on the recently-released 2.0. Most of that work has actually been on the underlying duplicity command line tool.

It lacked proper error reporting (didn’t separate errors from other informative console output) and didn’t indicate progress (so I could show a progress bar). I needed to add some sort of interprocess communication, so that a launching program could get useful feedback.

I proposed D-Bus as a good IPC mechanism on the duplicity mailing list, which was followed by a suprising (to me) amount of pushback. I guess D-Bus has a bad reputation as being overengineered/bloated? We eventually went with a text format that you could ask duplicity to write to a given file descriptor or filename. Something like this:

ERROR 2
. You messed up the foo,
. please reset your bar.

That change got into the recently released duplicity 0.5.03. My patch to add progress feedback is in CVS, and presumably will be in 0.5.04.

Now I’m turning my attention to translations. Déjà Dup displays some messages from duplicity directly, and it would be nice to have them translated. I hope to submit a patch to gettextize duplicity, but I’m not sure what the best place to outsource translations are these days. I’ve not been very happy with the Translation Project, and Launchpad Rosetta is nice, but not necessarily the best choice if you aren’t already using Launchpad. If you have any ideas, please let the mailing list know.

Meanwhile, I’ve got plans for world backup domination. I’ve filed a Request For Packaging with Debian. We’ll see how that goes. It’s taken a while for the various projects I know personally: gmult (21 months), xpad (6 months), dav-text (34 months).

I’ve also noticed that there’s going to be a session during the next Ubuntu Developer Summit about a backup solution for Jaunty. Well, well, well, Ubuntu. Have I got a solution for you. Now, Déjà Dup isn’t ready for prime-time use by bajillions of people. But I did start it because I didn’t think anything else was either. If I have six months, and possibly more help, maybe I could get it into shape.

I’ve been working on a secret project the past few weeks, and I’ve finally released the first version: Déjà Dup. It’s a frontend for the backup command line program duplicity.

The goal is to be a very easy-to-use backup program aimed at those (like me) who know they should backup but are too lazy. The “right way” to backup is often, off-site, and encrypted. But who has time to set that up?

Déjà Dup will make it easy to:

• Backup on a regular schedule (doesn’t do that yet)
• Backup into “the cloud” and defaults to Amazon S3 storage
• Encrypt your backup

The development is done on Launchpad. Feel free to contribute!