Monday 29 December 2008

Bonkey is now Open Source

Bonkey runs free with the buffalo.

The source to Bonkey is available on Sourceforge.net at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bonkey/ under an Apache 2.0 licence.

Please contact thebackupmonkey@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing to the project.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quite confusing interface regarding the "target" verbiage. For a newbie, they would not know whether they are over writing something. I have been in there for aobut 15 minutes and am still not sure how to synch two folders or drives???

Suggest you look at "Handy Backup" software interface to see how they create a very clear concept on what is actually getting backed up or synched.

Hope this helps!

bonkey said...

There's a fairly straightforward explanation in the help, perhaps try reading that. Please send any suggestions as to shortcomings to thebackupmonkey@gmail.

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I was hoping you might find the time to answer one quick question.

I am using bonkey to back-up my documents from a laptop onto an external hard drive. I went through the initial back-up process to put every file from 'my documents' onto my external. I then modified one file and tried to run a 'modified files only' back-up type to see how quickly it would back-up. Sadly, the program tried to back-up every single file again (around 4000 or so). Am I doing something wrong or have I misinterpreted 'modified files only'?

Thanks for your help and your program.

bonkey said...

It sounds like you're doing it just right - what should happen is that it only copies the one file that has changed.

In order to check that no other files have changed, Bonkey has to run through all your files and check when they were modified. So it isn't actually copying them, just checking the date and moving on. This will be much quicker than copying them.

If you let it run, it should report (in the History table inside the backup group) that only 1 file is copied and the rest have been skipped.

Feel free to send questions to thebackupmonkey at gmail if you still have problems.

BusinessHelper said...

Great product, simple to use and works great. I'm backing up a couple of folders on a Windows 2003 SBS to a Mac OS X Server SMB share. I didn't need a full blown server-based backup solution and Windows Backup is horrible. I just need something reliable and simple and found Bonkey.

Thanks,
Matt

Anonymous said...

This is one of the better Backup applications!

I was wondering if any progress has been made to correct the Amazon S3 encryption bug that was discussed in the October blog?

The temporary measures work (local encryption > UNENCRYPTED S3), but it would be really nice if the packing issue was overcome.

bonkey said...

Thanks for the kind feedback.

There's been no progress on the bug you refer to (lack of time rather than excessive difficulty).

However, now that Bonkey is open source, the door is open to patches from anyone...

Randy said...

I want to back up my C: drive (50 GB used) to an external 250 GB. Bonkey begins with "Refreshing directories and calculating work" but then exits with a Java heap space error. Where can I increase the heap space??

bonkey said...

You can pass vmargs specifying a bigger heap size ("bonkey.exe -vmargs -Xms128M -Xmx128M"). Good summary of the parameters here: http://www.devx.com/tips/Tip/5578. You may also want to play with the heap size arguments in wrapper.conf.

You could also divide it into two or more backups.

Anonymous said...

Has Bonkey been withdrawn?

I've been trying for days to download it from the sourceforge link but it just gives me a notice saying to come to your site here for download. Have tried some of the mirrors too, but same prob.

I'm getting nowhere at all with this, and very much want to try Bonkey.

Hope you can help.

bonkey said...

There's a "Latest Versions" link under the picture on the left hand side of the page - one for Windows, one for OS X. I've also added a fresh post to the top of the page.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

seeing that Bonkey is open source under Apache 2.0, the non-commerical restriction as per CC Australian Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs licence no longer applies and is superceded by free use? Just want to make sure that we're on the same page? Use is now free for all and good to go in any sphere of work/play?

Thanks,
Joe

bonkey said...

There's probably some very interesting legal questions there if anyone cared to explore them, since the binaries were built before the source code was put under an open license. But that sounds like hard work! Go for it - you're free to use it how and where you're like, the CC license is just an historical artifact.

Thomas William Daly said...

Great application. I'm using MacOSX and this is by far the best free backup utility out there.

Will there be any support for backing up mySQL in the future?

gaelicau@gmail.com

bonkey said...

Thanks for the kind words Thomas.

There are no immediate plans for MySQL. You're welcome to take a look at the code and write one yourself - the one for SQL Server shows one way of doing it.