found an exclude bug in Cobian Backup

Hi All,

Found this one out the hard way:

Cobian backup ignores excludes:

Cobian backup excludes must be lower case

If you dragged and dropped from Windows Explorer, you have to
go back and un-capitalize everything


I was getting rid of the *.TLG,*.ND, etc. trash files that
come with Quick Books.

-T

T wrote:

Found this one out the hard way:

Cobian backup ignores excludes:

Cobian backup excludes must be lower case

If you dragged and dropped from Windows Explorer, you have to
go back and un-capitalize everything

I was getting rid of the *.TLG,*.ND, etc. trash files that
come with Quick Books.

Not a Windows issue. Copying a list of file while retaining the true
filename, including any capitalization, is required because there are
some programs that are case sensitive. Access through the file I/O
system API calls is not case sensitive but file management within the
program itself is case sensitive.

I thought Cobian Backup was dead for quite awhile now. I see its home
page says there is a new owner; however, the forum is dead (well, it was
when I tried). Apparently the only means of reporting bugs was through
the forums but those may be gone. Using the WayBackMachine site page
archive, previous versions of Cobian's home page had a "Contact" e-mail
link ).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobian_Backup
"Development and support by the original author has been discontinued [3
years ago] with version 11.2.0.582 and the source code has since been
sold off."

On 11/17/2015 12:38 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
T wrote:

Found this one out the hard way:

Cobian backup ignores excludes:

Cobian backup excludes must be lower case

If you dragged and dropped from Windows Explorer, you have to
go back and un-capitalize everything

I was getting rid of the *.TLG,*.ND, etc. trash files that
come with Quick Books.

Not a Windows issue. Copying a list of file while retaining the true
filename, including any capitalization, is required because there are
some programs that are case sensitive. Access through the file I/O
system API calls is not case sensitive but file management within the
program itself is case sensitive.

I thought Cobian Backup was dead for quite awhile now. I see its home
page says there is a new owner; however, the forum is dead (well, it was
when I tried). Apparently the only means of reporting bugs was through
the forums but those may be gone. Using the WayBackMachine site page
archive, previous versions of Cobian's home page had a "Contact" e-mail
link ).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobian_Backup
"Development and support by the original author has been discontinued [3
years ago] with version 11.2.0.582 and the source code has since been
sold off."



Hi Vanguard,

Definitely a bug in the program. The mask should have
been case insensitive. I capitalized the mask because I
was matching the case of Quick Books extensions. Took
me a bit to figure out why the mask was being ignored.

And I reported it here to salt it into Google as Cobian's
forum is closed down for some time now.

The new owner is listed as:
http://www.cobiansoft.com/index.htm

Update: The new owner is James Sweeney. I'll update
this site soon with more information.

Which is great information as there are some bugs I would like
fixed. Even though the project has been dead for a while,
I still find myself using it a lot, as I have not found
anything close that can replace it.

I have written a manual backup set rotator to wrap Cobian
if anyone wants it. One of Cobian's options is to keep
a database of backup sets. This goes severely wrong
if you have multiple backup drives. My rotator works
around this beautifully. Plus it does disk maintenance
every backup. (What? Windows file systems going to hell
when you need it the most, like to restore a file? NEVER!)

Thank you for the heads up on the new owner. My link to
their site did not show it, so I found a better link
(the one above) and then it showed up.

-T

T wrote:

Definitely a bug in the program. The mask should have
been case insensitive. I capitalized the mask because I
was matching the case of Quick Books extensions. Took
me a bit to figure out why the mask was being ignored.

And I reported it here to salt it into Google as Cobian's
forum is closed down for some time now.

The new owner is listed as:
http://www.cobiansoft.com/index.htm

Update: The new owner is James Sweeney. I'll update
this site soon with more information.

Been saying that since 25-Jun-2014. Before that and since 23-Apr-2013,
it was saying "For Sale: Breaking news: Cobian Backup Source Code is now
for sale."

Which is great information as there are some bugs I would like
fixed. Even though the project has been dead for a while,
I still find myself using it a lot, as I have not found
anything close that can replace it.

Since the new owner who bought the source code has been promising to
take up the project

First the product was proprietary. Then the author went to open source
code. Then he went back to closed code. Then he sold it off. The new
owner hasn't changed the web site for 17 months after branding the site
with the "new owner" logo. Sure looks like the new owner has no
intention of continuing the project. Sometimes a company buys software
based on some plan but management discards the plan so the software just
collects dust. I worked on a mainframe backup project along with a
sysadmin for about a year and had it nearly finished. Mostly just the
documentation had to be written. Then the company decided to dump the
project. They didn't go with something else. They just decided in
their infinitesimal wisdom to not release the project. Another
possibility is Sweeney is going to used the purchased source code in a
commercial product. So Cobian will remain dead but some new backup
program under a different name will show up. Or Sweeney got the code so
he could customize it for some internal company use.

The copyright notice on the web site still note 2009. With almost a
year and half of nothing happening after the code sale, doesn't look
like there is much promise that Cobian will become a Lazarus project. A
WhoIs on cobiansoft.com still lists the old owner (Cobian). So the new
owner hasn't even bothered to update the domain registration. Maybe
Sweeney bought the code and then died. It could happen.

I have written a manual backup set rotator to wrap Cobian
if anyone wants it. One of Cobian's options is to keep
a database of backup sets. This goes severely wrong
if you have multiple backup drives. My rotator works
around this beautifully. Plus it does disk maintenance
every backup. (What? Windows file systems going to hell
when you need it the most, like to restore a file? NEVER!)

There is an old Sourceforge project at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobianbackup/

Looks abandoned; however, maybe you could get your code hosted there
(along with a comment that the Sourceforge version is old and to go to
cobiansoft.com or cobian.se to get the latest version).

On 11/18/2015 01:58 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
T wrote:

Definitely a bug in the program. The mask should have
been case insensitive. I capitalized the mask because I
was matching the case of Quick Books extensions. Took
me a bit to figure out why the mask was being ignored.

And I reported it here to salt it into Google as Cobian's
forum is closed down for some time now.

The new owner is listed as:
http://www.cobiansoft.com/index.htm

Update: The new owner is James Sweeney. I'll update
this site soon with more information.

Been saying that since 25-Jun-2014. Before that and since 23-Apr-2013,
it was saying "For Sale: Breaking news: Cobian Backup Source Code is now
for sale."

Which is great information as there are some bugs I would like
fixed. Even though the project has been dead for a while,
I still find myself using it a lot, as I have not found
anything close that can replace it.

Since the new owner who bought the source code has been promising to
take up the project

First the product was proprietary. Then the author went to open source
code. Then he went back to closed code. Then he sold it off. The new
owner hasn't changed the web site for 17 months after branding the site
with the "new owner" logo. Sure looks like the new owner has no
intention of continuing the project. Sometimes a company buys software
based on some plan but management discards the plan so the software just
collects dust. I worked on a mainframe backup project along with a
sysadmin for about a year and had it nearly finished. Mostly just the
documentation had to be written. Then the company decided to dump the
project. They didn't go with something else. They just decided in
their infinitesimal wisdom to not release the project.

That has got to take the wind out of your lungs!

Another
possibility is Sweeney is going to used the purchased source code in a
commercial product. So Cobian will remain dead but some new backup
program under a different name will show up. Or Sweeney got the code so
he could customize it for some internal company use.

The copyright notice on the web site still note 2009. With almost a
year and half of nothing happening after the code sale, doesn't look
like there is much promise that Cobian will become a Lazarus project. A
WhoIs on cobiansoft.com still lists the old owner (Cobian). So the new
owner hasn't even bothered to update the domain registration. Maybe
Sweeney bought the code and then died. It could happen.

I have written a manual backup set rotator to wrap Cobian
if anyone wants it. One of Cobian's options is to keep
a database of backup sets. This goes severely wrong
if you have multiple backup drives. My rotator works
around this beautifully. Plus it does disk maintenance
every backup. (What? Windows file systems going to hell
when you need it the most, like to restore a file? NEVER!)

There is an old Sourceforge project at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobianbackup/

Looks abandoned; however, maybe you could get your code hosted there
(along with a comment that the Sourceforge version is old and to go to
cobiansoft.com or cobian.se to get the latest version).


It ain't looking too good. Fortunately, the old version still
works well.

I would love to see an Open Source version of something like this.
One not chocked full of junkware as is Free File Sync (FFS) (Open
Candy). FFS also has issues with Volume Shadow copy Service:
as far as I can tell, it defaults to regular copy if
it finds no locks. This causes others trying to get a lock
while FFS is operating on the file to crash.

Cobian's Volume Shadow works flawlessly. Of course, if we were
to ever get a professional grade file system on Windows -- EXT4,
XFS, etc. -- this would not be an issue, not to mention the
capitalized file names issues either.

On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 04:31:40 -0800, T wrote:

Definitely a bug in the program. The mask should have
been case insensitive. I capitalized the mask because I
was matching the case of Quick Books extensions. Took
me a bit to figure out why the mask was being ignored.

And I reported it here to salt it into Google as Cobian's
forum is closed down for some time now.

I don't think there is any real pathway or link between here and Google.

--

Char Jackson

On 11/18/2015 02:41 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 04:31:40 -0800, T wrote:

Definitely a bug in the program. The mask should have
been case insensitive. I capitalized the mask because I
was matching the case of Quick Books extensions. Took
me a bit to figure out why the mask was being ignored.

And I reported it here to salt it into Google as Cobian's
forum is closed down for some time now.

I don't think there is any real pathway or link between here and Google.


I am not finding it is groups.google.com either. That is
sad. There is a lot of intellectual knowledge on this
group that could benefit a lot of others.

In message , T writes:
On 11/18/2015 02:41 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
[]
I don't think there is any real pathway or link between here and Google.


I am not finding it is groups.google.com either. That is
sad. There is a lot of intellectual knowledge on this
group that could benefit a lot of others.

I don't think they do alt.* 'groups.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

science is not intended to be foolproof. Science is about crawling toward the
truth over time. - Scott Adams, 2015-2-2

T wrote:

On 11/18/2015 01:58 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
T wrote:

Definitely a bug in the program. The mask should have
been case insensitive. I capitalized the mask because I
was matching the case of Quick Books extensions. Took
me a bit to figure out why the mask was being ignored.

And I reported it here to salt it into Google as Cobian's
forum is closed down for some time now.

The new owner is listed as:
http://www.cobiansoft.com/index.htm

Update: The new owner is James Sweeney. I'll update
this site soon with more information.

Been saying that since 25-Jun-2014. Before that and since 23-Apr-2013,
it was saying "For Sale: Breaking news: Cobian Backup Source Code is now
for sale."

Which is great information as there are some bugs I would like
fixed. Even though the project has been dead for a while,
I still find myself using it a lot, as I have not found
anything close that can replace it.

Since the new owner who bought the source code has been promising to
take up the project

First the product was proprietary. Then the author went to open source
code. Then he went back to closed code. Then he sold it off. The new
owner hasn't changed the web site for 17 months after branding the site
with the "new owner" logo. Sure looks like the new owner has no
intention of continuing the project. Sometimes a company buys software
based on some plan but management discards the plan so the software just
collects dust. I worked on a mainframe backup project along with a
sysadmin for about a year and had it nearly finished. Mostly just the
documentation had to be written. Then the company decided to dump the
project. They didn't go with something else. They just decided in
their infinitesimal wisdom to not release the project.

That has got to take the wind out of your lungs!

Another
possibility is Sweeney is going to used the purchased source code in a
commercial product. So Cobian will remain dead but some new backup
program under a different name will show up. Or Sweeney got the code so
he could customize it for some internal company use.

The copyright notice on the web site still note 2009. With almost a
year and half of nothing happening after the code sale, doesn't look
like there is much promise that Cobian will become a Lazarus project. A
WhoIs on cobiansoft.com still lists the old owner (Cobian). So the new
owner hasn't even bothered to update the domain registration. Maybe
Sweeney bought the code and then died. It could happen.

I have written a manual backup set rotator to wrap Cobian
if anyone wants it. One of Cobian's options is to keep
a database of backup sets. This goes severely wrong
if you have multiple backup drives. My rotator works
around this beautifully. Plus it does disk maintenance
every backup. (What? Windows file systems going to hell
when you need it the most, like to restore a file? NEVER!)

There is an old Sourceforge project at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobianbackup/

Looks abandoned; however, maybe you could get your code hosted there
(along with a comment that the Sourceforge version is old and to go to
cobiansoft.com or cobian.se to get the latest version).


It ain't looking too good. Fortunately, the old version still works
well.

I would love to see an Open Source version of something like this.
One not chocked full of junkware as is Free File Sync (FFS) (Open
Candy).

That runs only when called by the installer. It's a DLL file that the
installer calls to present the on-demand advertized bloatware. If you
just say No to all the additional offers (which you have to do, anyway,
for the bloatware that is bundled with other installers) or block the
outbound connection then OpenCandy is irrelevant. It gets a lot of undo
attention because users do not know how it actually works.

FFS also has issues with Volume Shadow copy Service: as far as I can
tell, it defaults to regular copy if it finds no locks. This causes
others trying to get a lock while FFS is operating on the file to
crash.

I wanted to copy my data files to my local OneDrive, Google Drive, or
similar folder and have the client sync it to an online copy; i.e., use
the local sync client to put a copy of the data-only backup up to online
storage. However, I wanted the output to be zipped to reduce the disk
footprint and with a password. FFS can't do zipping (so it also can't
do passwording). It's just a file sync tool. So I went to SyncBackFree
which does do .zip output w/password. Nope, the freeware SyncBack won't
do VSS, either. You have to pay to get that.

For me, about the only files (that I care about regarding potential to
restore later) that neither FFS or SyncBackFree couldn't grab (because
they don't use VSS) are my e-mail files. I leave my e-mail client
loaded all the time so those files are always inuse. However, I use
IMAP to my e-mail accounts. That means the IMAP server is itself my
backup mechanism. What's in my local copy is the same as what is in the
server copy hence the point of using IMAP as the sync protocol. If I
install a new e-mail client, do a fresh install of the old one, do a
whole new install of the OS with e-mail client, or connect using an
e-mail client on another host, what I see in the e-mail client is what I
see up on the server. In fact, while I am not susceptible on the client
side, I am susceptible to the server and its control over my account.
In about 20 years of using IMAP, I think the IMAP server screwed up my
Inbox maybe twice. However, I don't use my Inbox as the sole repository
of e-mails that I want to keep. I move those into another folder. So
any screwup of the Inbox folder is limited to maybe a week's worth of
messages that I haven't yet deleted or moved out of there. If you use
IMAP to your e-mail account, you don't have to backup the local files.

If you need to add VSS to FFS, SyncBack, or some other file sync tool,
maybe you could use VSScopy (http://www.vsscopy.com/). I haven't used
it so I do not know if it has a CLI (command-line interface) to let you
run it from the command line - so you could use it in a batch file or
script where you run it first to sync files to a temp/hold folder and
then use FFS or SyncBack to upload the files to NAS or online storage.

Oh look, I just visited the VSScopy web site and see it does have a CLI:

http://vsscopy.com/support/faqs.html

I remember looking at VSScopy before but uninstalled it because I needed
to work in cooperation with other sync/backup tools. Now that I know it
has a CLI, I might look at it again.

Cobian's Volume Shadow works flawlessly. Of course, if we were
to ever get a professional grade file system on Windows -- EXT4,
XFS, etc. -- this would not be an issue, not to mention the
capitalized file names issues either.

To be fair, FFS and Syncback are primarily synchronization tools. After
all, even if they did support VSS, they could only support it for
reading the locked file to save a copy up on the server (or wherever is
the saved copy of the files). They can't be used to restore those files
while the originals are still locked. For e-mail, yeah, you could
unload the e-mail program but you can't do that for the system files.
They have a different goal for handling files than a backup program
despite users often use FFS or SyncBack as backup programs. I can use a
big screwdriver as a pry bar, too.

Considering Easeus ToDo Home and Macrium Reflect have free versions (and
you can even find an older version of Acronis True Image that is free
*if* the backed up HDD is made by Western Digital) and since they
support VSS, I'm not sure what's the point of continuing to use Cobian.
Macrium Reflect Free only does full and differential backups but Easeus
free does full, differential, and incrementals. Even when Cobian was
actively supported, there were other free alternatives. Typically the
lack of changing to another backup program is user inertia: they don't
want to learn a different program despite most of the concepts are the
same. You're probably not an immotile user. Perhaps your customers are.

Char Jackson wrote:

T wrote:

I reported it here to salt it into Google as Cobian's forum is closed
down for some time now.

I don't think there is any real pathway or link between here and Google.

Correct. Searching Google Groups (groups.google.com) is not the same as
searching using Google's web crawler (www.google.com). For example, if
I search on "vanguardLH" (sans quotes) at www.google.com, I see my posts
in web-based forums. None of the hits are for my posts in Usenet.

There are leeching forums. They use an NNTP-to-HTTP gateway to copy
posts to/from Usenet into their web-based forum. This lets them pretend
they have a larger audience. Alas, many of those **** up the References
header (it is not part of the forum software's database for its records
so any replies that go back out to Usenet won't have a References header
which means hierarchical threading is lost). In the above
www.google.com search, I did see some of my posted leeched from Usenet
turn up hits at web-based forums, like vistax64.com, pcbanter.com,
office-outlook.com, etc. Howard's Usenet archive is too hard to use
(unless you already know the MID on which you want to search for a
specific article). Google has destroyed the Deja News archive they
acquired as searching is nearly impossible and rarely focused on the
actual search criteria.

Expecting a post here to get visibility outside of Usenet, like into the
leeching NNTP-to-HTTP gatewayed forums or a circumstantial hit (not a
search) at Google Groups, will get so little visibility, especially to
other Cobian users, that you'd stand a better chance with a lottery.
Too bad the professed "new owner" of Cobian doesn't identify himself at
the old web site, in the abandoned Sourceforge project, or even bother
to change registration of the domain to himself with valid contact info.
After 17 months of announcing he bought the code, it's highly likely
that the project is dead or getting usurped into some other project.

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , T writes:
On 11/18/2015 02:41 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
[]
I don't think there is any real pathway or link between here and Google.


I am not finding it is groups.google.com either. That is
sad. There is a lot of intellectual knowledge on this
group that could benefit a lot of others.

I don't think they do alt.* 'groups.

They do the alt.* groups, just not all of them.
Think of them as grandfathered from dejanews.

The Google archive lacks the manual intervention
required to newgroup alt.* additions. If there
was an email address for the maintainer, we could
send an email and request the addition of the group.

Paul

On 11/18/2015 06:12 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
That runs only when called by the installer. It's a DLL file that the
installer calls to present the on-demand advertized bloatware. If you
just say No to all the additional offers (which you have to do, anyway,
for the bloatware that is bundled with other installers) or block the
outbound connection then OpenCandy is irrelevant. It gets a lot of undo
attention because users do not know how it actually works.

I make sure I always run the "Custom" installer for such
reasons. Once I find such nonsense, I develop a distrust
of the developer and usually will avoid his stuff from that
point on.

I have enough trouble with the TRASH that Flash and Java updates
trying to trick my users into installing.

And I am somewhat annoyed at Firefox for making Yahoo the default
search engine. That and including Bing in its list of search
engines. Thunderbird comes with Bing as its default. I remove
it post hast from Thunderbird.