Another Backup Tool? - The roots of storeBackup

Possibly, there are thousands of backup programs. So, why another one? The reason arose from my activities as a consultant. The entire week I was moving around and I had no way to secure my data during the week at home. All I had was a 250MB ZIP drive connected to the parallel port of my laptop. The backup on the ZIP drive did not give me a lot of storage space and I had to live with a low bandwidth (about 200KB/s) and high latency. In contradiction to that I wanted fast, simple access to my data - I did not like the usual options of full, differential and incremental backups (e.g. with tar or dump): On one hand, it is usually too cumbersome to retrieve one of the versions, on the other hand it is not possible to delete an old backup at will, as this has to be planned carefully at the generation of the backup.

It was my goal to be able to backup quickly during my work and find my files quickly and without hassle.

So, at the end of 1999 the first version of storeBackup was created. It was, however, not suitable for large environments. It was not performing well enough, did not scale sufficiently and was not able do deal with nasty file names (e.g. '$\backslash$n' in a name).

Based on that experience with the first version, I wrote a new one which was published a little bit less than a year later under the GPL. In the meantime the number of users had grown - from home user applications, securing of (mail) directories at ISPs, small and medium sized companies or hospitals as well as universities and for general archiving.