Dun (OS X)

Dun is a tool to backup files to remote (FTP, WebDAV, .mac) or local storage devices. It is especially designed for Mac OS X 10.5, but a version for Mac OS X 10.4 will be available soon. As Dun is designed as a menulet (application which is placed in the menubar) backup and restore operations can be easily done directly from the menubar with a single click.

Dun can automatically backup to an inserted USB Stick, iPod or any other portable storage device which is mountable with Mac OS X. The only thing you need to do is to format the storage device using the HFS+ file system and mark the backup set for automatic backups (HFS UUID detection).

With smart list backups it is possible depending on the name or the content of the file to backup every file in a certain location. You can define different smart tags and add them to a smart list which you select for your backup set. When the backup is started Dun automatically finds the files for your query and backups them.

With Dun it is also possible to schedule backups for different times. It is not only possible to create one cronjob for a backup set, but you can also have multiple cronjobs for each backup set. If Dun is started scheduled backups will be automatically done in the background. If the application was not used for some time, it will gather automatically if a backup needs to be done.

Dun creates backup files using tar to bundle and then bzip2 to compress the tar archive. Tools to read both of these file formats are bundled with Mac OS X and most Linux distributions.For Windows a lot of freeware tools to compress or decompress these file formats are available. A good open source tool is for example 7zip, which can be obtained under: http://www.7-zip.org/.

Bzip2 is a freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor: http://www.bzip.org/
The tar format is licensed by the GNU and is standardized by POSIX.1-1988 and POSIX.1-2001. More information and also the sources can be obtained under: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/

A new feature which came with Mac OS X 10.5 is Quick Look. It allows the user to preview nearly every file on his system, including images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word and Excel files.
To use this feature in Dun just tap the Space bar in the “Restore Files” windows to see the file in Quick Look.