Chapter 1. Introduction
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# Chapter 1. Introduction

> “Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.”— Linus Torvalds, at the release of Linux 2.0.8 in July of 1996.

## What is Cedar Backup?

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.

Alternately, Cedar Backup can write your backups to the Amazon S3 cloud rather than relying on physical media.

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 2 programming language.

There are many different backup software implementations out there in the 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 on a regular basis. Cedar Backup isn't for you if you want to back up your huge MP3 collection every night, or if you want to back up a few hundred machines. However, if you administer a small set of machines and you want to run daily incremental backups for things like system configuration, current email, small web sites, Subversion or Mercurial repositories, or small MySQL databases, 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 2, 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 2 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 or talking to the Amazon S3 infrastructure. A full list of dependencies is provided in the section called “Installing Dependencies”.

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