I’m happy to announce our Strongspace app is now available for Windows. It shares the same core as our Mac client and it provides continuous backup within a 10 minute window – pushing only the incremental changes to Strongspace and taking a ZFS snapshot of your data on the hour.

Getting it going is as simple as selecting what you’d like backed up.

You can any folder on your machine and it gets pushed right out to Strongspace. This is based on rsync and ssh (encrypted and compressed transmission) and the core is being developed in public on GitHub. This is an early version and is likely to have a bug or two – send feedback to support@expandrive.com and make sure to install the automatic updates as they come in.

Download StrongspaceSetup.exe v0.3.6 for Windows and get backing up!

You can now track the number of times a file or folder you share from Strongspace has been viewed. First head over to the shared links tab on your sidebar…

Now you can see the number of times the link has been viewed, along with an easy way to see everything you’ve shared as well as manager the links. Here’s an example.

As we’ve promised before, we’ll get password protection in there soon. If you have any other feedback on this sharing feature, leave a note in the comments.

Cyberduck is a great free SFTP client that you can use to connect to Strongspace. It’s available for both Mac and Windows.

One of the benefits of using an SFTP client like Cyberduck or Transmit is that it makes it easy to upload and download entire folders of files at once. They also allow you to easily restart a large upload or download that might’ve been interrupted.

Here is a short screencast showing how to connect to Strongspace using Transmit via SFTP.

Found over on the macos-x-server mailing list: It looks like Don Brady, a former senior engineer at Apple, has started a company to finally bring ZFS to OS X

His company name is named Ten’s Compliment and he’s on on Twitter as @tenscomplement.

Very cool! Good luck Don!

I’m very happy to announce that we’re making public the beta for Strongspace.app for the Mac. The app provides continuous realtime backup, currently within a 10 minute window, of any folder on your Mac. It’s dead simple, it’s based on rsync, it’s being developed in public on GitHub and it just works. Here’s a screenshot, simple – right?

Add any other folder, and it gets pushed right up to Strongspace. Once it’s there, you can share any file or folder with one click via the web interface.

In addition, Strongspace.app automatically takes a full ZFS snapshot of everything you’re backing up once per hour and thins snapshots out to daily and weekly snapshots, just like Apple Time Machine.

It’s kind of like Time Machine in the cloud – pushing your data safely onto ZFS and letting you share anything, with anyone, using only one click.

Download the latest version here

We’re currently testing builds for Windows and should have a release in a matter of weeks.

The Strongspace Gem and Command Line Utility has been updated to v0.1. The biggest user-facing change is that this includes a new ss executable, which is just an abbreviated version of the strongspace command. To update, run:

$ sudo gem install strongspace

Also, the Strongspace Rsync Plugin has been updated to v0.2. To update, run:

$ ss plugins:install git://github.com/expandrive/strongspace-rsync.git

Support has been added for multiple rsync backup profiles so that you can manage a variety of backups from the tool, rather than just one. It will automatically upgrade your configuration the first time you run it.

=== Rsync Backup
rsync:list                                        # List backup profiles
rsync:run <name>                                  # Run a backup profile
rsync:create <name>                               # Create a backup profile
rsync:delete <name>                               # Delete a backup profile
rsync:schedule <name>                             # Schedules continuous backup
rsync:unschedule <name>                           # Unschedules continuous backup
rsync:logs                                        # Opens Console.app and shows the Backup log

The recently released rsync backup plugin should now correctly schedule itself on Linux and Solaris using cron and the [required] cronedit gem. To update the plugin you just need to run the install command again.

$ strongspace plugins:install git://github.com/expandrive/strongspace-rsync.git

Also coming this week: support for excluding files/folders and Windows support.

Min RK forked and generalized the commands of my continuous iTunes Backup plugin into a continuous rsync backup plugin for Strongspace. Given that the iTunes plugin doesn’t yet have much specific to iTunes this makes a lot of sense and provides a nice template for building other plugins.

I’ve pulled his fork back to it’s own Github project. Introducing the the strongspace-rsync plugin. This plugin requires the Strongspace gem v0.0.9 or newer, the open4 gem and working copies of rsync and git.

$ strongspace plugins:install git://github.com/expandrive/strongspace-rsync.git

You now have access to these commands:

=== Rsync Backup
rsync:backup                                      # Performs a backup of a directory
rsync:setup                                       # Create a backup profile
rsync:schedule_backup                             # Schedules continuous backup
rsync:unschedule_backup                           # Unschedules continuous backup
rsync:logs                                        # Opens Console.app and shows the Backup log

Keep the forks coming.

Here is our first plugin for the Strongspace gem – the continuous iTunes backup plugin. Currently it only works on Mac but will support Windows soon enough.

Installation

Upgrade/Install the Strongspace gem to v0.0.9 or newer:

$ sudo gem install strongspace

Install the Strongspace iTunes plugin and dependencies [dependency installation will become automatic soon]

$ strongspace plugins:install git://github.com/expandrive/strongspace-itunes.git
$ sudo gem install open4

Now when you run strongspace help you will see these extra commands.

=== iTunes Backup
itunes:backup                                     # Performs a backup of iTunes
itunes:setup                                      # Create a backup profile for iTunes
itunes:schedule_backup                            # Schedules continuous iTunes backup
itunes:unschedule_backup                          # Unschedules continuous iTunes backup
itunes:log                                       # Opens Console.app and shows the iTunes Backup log

This plugin assumes you have password-less authentication already set up. To set up password-less key-based authentication first run strongspace keys:add to get it going.

Usage

To get started just run

 $ strongspace itunes:backup

This will kick off the itunes:setup task, which lets you select your iTunes Library location and where on Strongspace you’d like to store it. Configuration is stored in ~/.strongspace/iTunesBackup.config as a YAML file. With setup complete the backup will attempt to run and will print its log to your terminal.

Following a successful backup this plugin writes a hash code to ~/.strongspace/iTunesBackup.lastbackup indicating the state of the iTunes Library the last time a successful backup was made. If you run strongspace itunes:backup again without using/modifying your iTunes library the plugin will let you know that iTunes library has not changed since last backup attempt. and exit successfully.

Scheduling

The Strongspace iTunes plugin can be easily be scheduled to continuously backup your library as it changes. To set this up run:

$ strongspace itunes:schedule_backup

This configures launchd to run the iTunes backup every minute – first checking to see if your library has changed and then performing the backup if necessary. This task stays scheduled between reboots, sleep/wake and so forth. To turn it off run strongspace itunes:unschedule_backup

Logs of the scheduled backup tasks can be viewed by running

$ strongspace itunes:log

Feedback

This is our first plugin and is under active development. Shoot an email to jmancuso@expandrive.com with any comments or suggestions. If you want to make an awesome fork an have us merge some great changes, we’d love that too.