[Box Backup] Happy New Year, and a call to action!

[Chris Wilson]

Dear Box Backup users,

(tl;dr: please let us know that you're still here and still care!)

I'm sorry that I haven't communicated much over the last few years. Traffic
on this list has dropped substantially, so it may seem that not much is
happening, and I occasionally get a question about when the next release
will be, or whether the project is still alive. I've also got a new job (3
years ago) and had a child (2 years ago) which have drastically reduced the
amount of time I have available to work on projects in my spare time.

And I wanted to let you all know that I am still working on Box Backup, and
what I'm doing. Although other open source backup software has grown in
features (especially s3cmd which now supports client-side encryption), I
think that Box Backup's unique combination of features is still very
valuable, particularly for laptops (and as long as there are still
laptops!).

For me personally, TimeMachine kind of works, and makes restoring very
easy, but suffers from losing my entire backup every few months, the
initial backup when this happens takes days, it's not encrypted on the
server, and it would be useless on a remote server.

But working on open source software is hard and often unrewarding apart
from the positive feedback from users. *So now I'd like to hear from you:*
if you still use Box Backup, why? What makes it the best tool for some job?
And if not, why not? What can we do to make it better?

If you'd like to share your story with the mailing list, that would be
great, provided that we don't have a hundred people doing it and flood the
list and annoy people. If you'd prefer to email the developers only at
boxbackup-dev at lists.boxbackup.org, that's fine too. It would still be great
to hear from you.

In the mean time, we've been working on a few things requested by users:

   - OpenSSL 1.1 support (which I expect to merge tonight, a slightly late
   Christmas present for you!)
   - Moving the code to GitHub to facilitate collaboration with the
   community.

It's been very encouraging that we've had a few pull requests and issues
created since we moved the code to GitHub, so clearly we do still have a
community, but it would be great (for me at least) to know how many of you
there are, and to engage with you more.

And since I've had very little time to work on release engineering, James
O'Gorman and I have put a lot of work into continuous integration, with the
intention of ensuring that every commit (merge) to the master branch is
fully QA tested and should be regarded as a stable release. Windows binary
packages (ZIP files and a basic installer) are also built automatically for
every such commit (merge), and deployed on GitHub Releases
<https://github.com/boxbackup/boxbackup/releases>.

We are not quite there yet: in particular, Unix distribution packages (
makedistribution.pl tarballs) are currently untested, and distro packages
(RPMs, Debs, etc) are either unavailable or in a poor state. For example,
Debian packages are built without running any tests, and are probably
broken since the half-finished port to OpenSSL 1.1. Volunteers are most
welcome to help address this, even if it's just saying that you care and
want to see something fixed.

I've also been working on features that are important to me for my own use
of Box Backup:

   - Amazon S3 backend (no more requirement for a bbstored server): not
   finished but the end is in sight.
   - Real snapshots and backup version management: work started, but a long
   way to go.
   - Code cleanups (many TODOs).
   - A fully working cross-platform GUI: work suspended for several years,
   but recently restarted by Richard Eigenmann.
   - Integration with the QNAP NAS, including a javascript web UI.

There's much more that I could say, but I'd rather let you ask the
questions that matter to you, and I'll be happy answer them.

I'd like to thank you all for sticking with us, James for maintaining the
website and the build bots, and my partner Ailsa and son Oscar for putting
up with me spending a lot of time on Box Backup that they might rather I'd
spent on parental duty.

Wishing you a very happy 2018, and looking forward to hearing from you,

Chris Wilson.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.boxbackup.org/pipermail/boxbackup/attachments/20180101/5b694b70/attachment-0001.html>