One day in 2003 I
was backing up my hard drive and thought
gee, what I really need is
an archive program that compresses a list of files into individual
archives. So I did a search for
"batch zip programs" and found something called
Batch
Zip Toolkit. It did everything I wanted.. but it did a bunch of
other stuff I didn't really care about.. and it cost $20 to register.
I thought
why should I pay $20 for something I can write in
under a month? Roughly 30 days later a program called
Debigulator
was born.
In hindsight my time is worth slightly more than $20 a month
but it was an interesting challenge nonetheless. I was fairly happy with
the first version of Debigulator, it worked for me but maybe wasn't
great for others. Out of nowhere in 2007 I got the itch to revive
Debigulator to make it more accessible. The first iteration of this
effort is
Debigulator 1.1, it's remarkably similar to the original but a tad simpler
to navigate. It also sets the program up for a future 2.0 version which I have some interesting plans for.
-Archives files into individual archives.
-Writes archives in either .zip or .jar format.
-Save/load sessions, useful if you want to run the same backup job multiple times.
-Verify that the contents of archives match original files.
-Totally free and open-source.
Alright so the first step is obviously running the program. If you have
the Java runtime environment installed on Windows you can just
double-click the icon for Debigulator to run it. Otherwise, from a
command-line you can run: "java -jar Debigulator_<version>.jar".
Choose the files to archive. In the upper-left pane there are buttons to
change the current directory. Select files and use the add buttons to
put them in the list of files to archive.
You can remove items in the list of files to archive by selecting them
and using the remove button, the remove all button does
what you'd expect.
Select the destination directory for the archived files. Use the buttons
in the lower panel to browse for a location. Check the sync to source
directory checkbox to make the output directory the same as the
current source directory.
At this point you can create the archives (next step) unless you want to set some additional options.
The archive type list lets you select what type of archives to create, chances are you'll want to stick with 'zip'.
The action after archive list lets you select what to do after
creating archives. The default is to do nothing. You can change it to
verify the archives (which can take a while), delete the source files,
or delete the source files after verifying them.
Press either of the advanced settings buttons to launch the advanced
settings dialog.
From the advanced settings dialog you can configure the following:
Automatically save current session on exit - fairly self-explanatory.
Append archive names with date - add the date to the name of output archives, useful if you're regularly backing-up files that change often.
Append archive names with original extension - adds the extension to the
output file, useful if you're backing-up files with the same name or
something.
Enable debug logs - probably only useful to someone modifying the
program.
Click either of the run buttons to start creating archives.
A progress dialog will display, click OK when it's done.
If you're going to run the same backup job a lot you can save the session.
The saved session contains all the files and settings you've selected.
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