Hey all, I'm looking for help testing a project I've been working on over the last few months. Snap [1] is a cross-platform system snapshot and restoration utility which uses the underlying package management system to take snapshots of packages installed as well as files modified outside of the package management system.

Only files modified post-installation and new-files (eg those not tracked by the package system) are backed up so that snapshots are lightweight and are able to be migrated across hosts. Currently supported are RPM based distros (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS), Deb based distros (Debian, Ubutunu), and Windows

Also supported are service snapshots. For example postgres and mysql db's will be backed up, as are Apache and IIS websites using the native tooling. All of this is built ontop of a very modular / plugable system which allows developers to extend Snap to take and restore snapshots of any custom target.

My intention of this project was to make cross-virtualization-hypervisor and cross-cloud-provider [2] snapshots a cinch, but it can also be used for general system backup and recovery.

 I've tried to harden it up as much as I could up to this point, writing an extensive test suite, and conducting full integration testing on various platforms but am looking for more widespread testing, especially in alternative environments. Also I would like to start forming a community around this project, to write backends to support snapshots on a variety of platforms and of a variety of services.

The project is as open source as it gets, written in Python and licensed under the GPLv3. I've submitted Snap to Fedora [3] and Debian / Ubuntu [4], any package reviews would be more than appreciated.

Thanks for reading so far!

-Mo Morsi


[1] https://github.com/movitto/snap

[2] http://mo.morsi.org/blog/node/347

[3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=755890

[4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=649585