Cedar Backup is a Python package that supports secure backups of files on local and remote hosts to CD-R or CD-RW media. Cedar Backup also includes extensions that understand how to back up MySQL databases and Subversion repositories, and it can be easily extended to support other data sources, as well.

The package is focused around weekly backups to a single disc, with the expectation that the disc will be changed or overwritten at the beginning of each week. If your hardware is new enough, Cedar Backup can write multisession discs, allowing you to add to a disc in a daily fashion. Directories are backed up using tar and may be compressed using gzip or bzip2.

There are many different backup software implementations out there in the free-and open-source world. Cedar Backup aims to fill a niche: it aims to be a good fit for people who need to back up a limited amount of important data to CD-R or CD-RW on a regular basis. Cedar Backup isn't for you if you want to back up your MP3 collection every night, or if you want to back up a few hundred machines. However, if you administer a small set machines and you want to run daily incremental backups for things like system configuration, current email, small web sites, or a CVS repository, then Cedar Backup is probably worth your time.

Cedar Backup has been developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and is currently supported only on Debian and other Linux systems. However, since it is written in portable Python, it should in theory run without too many problems on other UNIX-like systems which have a working version of the cdrecord and mkisofs utilities.