Tuesday 20 April 2010

Bonkey 3.4 - CloudFiles support! And more...

As the saying goes, monkeys never sleep. Wait. Monkeys never forget? Whatever.

Bonkey has been updated to version 3.4, with support for RackSpace CloudFiles. It's a cheap, solid alternative to S3.

There are a few other improvements as well:
  • native SFTP and FTP support, meaning more speed and less (or less durable) bugs;
  • support for passive mode in FTP transfers;
  • version number in the About dialog;
  • lots of internal rearchitecting to allow new features;
  • removed .enc extension for encrypted files, and fixed a bug with decrypting from local files.
There are bound to be a few bugs, so let me know as you run into them. With all the internals updated, stamping them out should be as easy as catching monkeys. Or something.

30 comments:

Unknown said...

Downloaded this version on a new machine. The rackspace option gave an indication that something is different.
And it was...
It seems not to work anymore.
Trying to back up my C:\Documents and Settings\user dir produces just "The system cannot find the file specified" errors. Looks like a file path error somewhere.

bonkey said...

Thanks for the catch - a careless error left in the release. Please download it again and have another go. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Andrea said...

Using new version tried to run a backup to an external drive (have never run a successful backup before).

It failed and my harddrive is now full. Roughly 20-30 GB used by something.

What Bonkey temp files should I look for?

Andrea said...

Oh, my hard drive problems were with Mac OS.

bonkey said...

Hey Andrea - I haven't seen this problem myself, but someone else reported it in the past. See the comment from Xavierdes at http://thebackupmonkey.blogspot.com /2008/10/updates.html, explaining where he found the files. Let me know if that doesn't solve your problem.

Andrea said...

I was able to find the files. But I don't want to try again to get Bonkey to work without knowing why it happened. What would stop it from eating all the space on my hard drive again?

I've tried to fix the java heap message, but the fix described on the site doesn't work. Because of that, I just keep breaking my groups down into smaller chunks, but I'm still running into problems, such as eating my Mac hard drive space.

Bonkey does exactly what I'm looking for. I just haven't had luck running it yet :-(

bonkey said...

Hi Andrea - that's fair enough. One of the limitations I have when developing it is that the only Mac I have access to is from work, and I can't use USB with it, which makes this issue difficult to test. Just for everybody else, can you explain where you found the files?

Regarding heap space, my next challenge is to improve the memory handling so that Bonkey can handle bigger backups. Until then, I'm afraid you'll just have to work around it.

Sean said...

I'm having a bit of trouble getting bonkey to work with an FTP backup. Whenever I run the backup I get errors like this:

Error backing up file.doc to ftp.myftp.com: Error creating directory Documents: Error creating directory Documents - FTP error: 550 Can't create directory: File exists

When I check if anything happened on the server I see that a new directory called "Documents" (yes, the file name includes the quotes) has been created in the root of my FTP share and nothing is in the remote_backup folder I set as the URI.

Is there a special trick to getting this to work or is my webhost just not playing nice?

Thanks for your time!

bonkey said...

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm having a tough time with FTP - it works fine with the FTP server I've setup here, but a number of folks have reported issues. Ping me at thebackupmonkey at the mail run by Google and let me know what OS you're on, and I'll send you a test version and see if it solves your problem.

Bonkey

Savvas said...

Great software for backing up from Cloud Files to your hard disk!

Unfortunately the day after the profile creation this java error pops every time i press the Run button:

An internal error occurred during: "Run now".
java.lang.NullPointerException


Thanks so much bonkey!!

Savvas said...

Oh bonkey! By the way the log gives this error:

Error loading backup item: No enum const class com.bonkey.filesystem.browsable.BrowsableItemFactory$ItemClass.CloudfilesFolder

bonkey said...

Bug! Thanks for the report. I'll work on a fix and post a comment here when it's updated. Cheers!

bonkey said...

New version released which should fix that bug (and another) - see the new blog post. Cheers!

Anonymous said...

I am trying to use bonkey to backup file onto a remote server.

I have set things up but bonkey doe not transfer any files!

bonkey said...

You'll have to give me a few more details - email thebackupmonkey at gmail.

Anonymous said...

Hi! Excited when I found this program. I get error message when I try to back up via FTP. "Error creating directory for ...."
Using MAC 10.6

Might this have something to do with my host server settings?

Regards

Gareth

bonkey said...

Hi Gareth - FTP support is unfortunately flaky. I've been having a lot of trouble getting it right. There's a release candidate at http://s3.amazonaws.com/bonkey/setup_rc.exe - please try it out and let me know if it solves the problem for you.

Bonkey

Anonymous said...

Thanks for replay, but I'm using SL 10.6 so cant use the program you linked

http://s3.amazonaws.com/bonkey/setup_rc.exe

Is there one for the mac?

Gareth

bonkey said...

Yes, there is: http://s3.amazonaws.com/bonkey/Bonkey_rc.zip

Anonymous said...

bonkey, I had similar problems with FTP, namely the fact that I couldn't seem to specify the remote directory (my FTP user game access to /, and I wanted my files in /httpdocs). I ended up editing my /etc/httpd file to respecify the root directory of my FTP user but then Bonkey was adding quotes around all the remote directory names. The RC linked above seemed to fix this. Thanks a ton for the awesome software! My only other complaint is that I can't make one of the folders on my computer be the root directory of a backup, for example if my backup is named "My Backup" and I want to backup C:\folder to D:\Folder Backup, my files end up in D:\Folder Backup\My Backup\folder.

Unknown said...

Hi. I'm new to bonkey. Set up a couple of backup groups. One is designed to back up the documents folder on my mac (a relatively small folder) this works fine. My second group is my pictures folder, which is large due to .nef files. Im trying to just copy the nef files. I tell it to run manually, and it goes what seems to be all the way through, but at the end says 'Could not determine the type of file "smb://eeepcfs/backupfolder".' "smb://eeepcfs/backupfolder" is the path of the network share i am trying to write to (on ubuntu). As I say, my documents folder goes fine, and the files appear to all have copied for my photos, but then this error appears. Any ideas? I'd really appreciate your help.

bonkey said...

Hi Daniel - that's usually the error given when Bonkey can't write to a network share. Is it full, by any chance?

bonkey said...

Anonymous - glad to hear the RC works for FTP. Others might like to try that.

Re folders, there's no way to do that at present. I'll put it on the todo list.

KBucklen said...

The RC worked great to solve the FTP problem. Thank You!

Liz said...

Hi...i've been using Bonkey for 2 weeks. Everything was working fine until today when I cant do my backup anymore. The error is "An internal error occurred during: "Run now".
java.lang.NullPointerException" Tried to update Bonkey but no success either. My Bonkey version is 3.4.1. Can you help? Thanks!

bonkey said...

Hi Liz

That's strange. Nothing else about your setup has changed?

Bonkey

Unknown said...

I am trying to get bonkey working with mac osx. I have an ftp server setup at home that is functioning fine with my windows machines but when i try to setup an ftp backup of my dad's macbook pro it says can not create the directory. It actually does create a folder on the server but doesn't put anything in the folder.

rvcormier said...

Rene said
I just started using Bonkey Monkey yesterday. I was able to upload to S3 sevweral backup groups. However there is 1 group I can't upload. The error is "An internal error occurred during: "Run now".
java.lang.NullPointerException" Can you help? Thanks!

bonkey said...

Hi Daniel,

Sorry for the delay. Try the release candidate I put together, that may fix this bug: http://s3.amazonaws.com/bonkey/Bonkey_rc.zip

Bonkey

bonkey said...

Hi Rene,

It's hard to guess what that would be without more information. You can email the details to thebackupmonkey at gmail, but it might be a little while before I can look at it.

Bonkey