COMP 2555 Computer Forensics--Project 3

Due: May 20, 2009

You are required to write a program/script that can do automatic incremental/full back up of important files and folders from your PC using a compression utility, such as 7-zip.

Here are the requirements:

• Read the paths to the files and folders to be backed up from a text file
• Create a compressed bundle of these files/folders
• Transport the bundle to the CS server
• Back up process should happen automatically and periodically. In other words, at a certain time of the day of your choosing,
  • the program gets activated,
  • looks to see if it is on the same LAN as cs.du.edu (if not on the same LAN, aborts)
  • makes a decision as to whether to do incremental or full backup,
  • create a compressed file, and
  • perform the transfer
• Do a full back up every month, on a day of your choosing, independent of whether there were changes to the files.

In incremental back up, you only add to the bundle the files that have changed since the last backup. Some things to keep in mind

• Initially, you have to do a full backup
• Once, the compressed file is transferred, delete the old one
• Test your solution by uncompressing the compressed bundle, and restoring the files
• Experiment only on unimportant files and folders (not on your "real" directories)