Long ago, there was a computer called the Amiga.
I used to use them, and to this day, I have never found anything quite so wonderfully friendly. I look at modern GUI toolkits and application libraries, and I am stunned at how much they suck compared to the Amiga’s UI toolkit.
So, the Amiga used to have this backup program, which came with the system, and it was called HDBackup, but it had a command-line back end, called BRU. When Amiga Unix came out, they managed to get BRU ported to it.
Today, BRU is used on Linux, BSD, and a dozen other systems; they’re up to version 17.
I wrote to ask if they were related to the company that used to maintain HDBackup, because I had just found what appeared to be an HDBackup archive floating around on an old tape. The answer? Yes, they were, and a demo version of BRU ought to read the old archives. So, I downloaded a demo of BRU, and sure enough, it works. It extracts those old tapes of long ago.
How many of the companies selling backup solutions out there would be able to read an archive made over ten years ago, on a kind of computer that isn’t even made anymore? Not all that many, I’d tend to suspect. That’s an impressive track record. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think that maybe these people are serious about their work, you know what I mean?
Cool people. Thanks to them, I have lost one less set of backups. :)