I spent a good part of my Christmas break on my beloved sofa, working on Little Backup Box. As a result, the new version features quite a few major improvements and minor tweaks.
Let’s start with the headline-grabbing changes. Little Backup Box now integrates comitup. This tool provides functionality I wanted to have in Little Backup Box for the the longest time: it makes it possible to connect the Raspberry Pi to a wireless network via a simple web web interface. To do this, comitup puts the Raspberry Pi into the hotspot mode. Connect to the hotspot from another device from another device, and you can use the landing page to hook the Raspberry Piok the Raspberry Pi up to one of the detected wireless networks. From now on, the Raspberry Pi will will connet automatically to the configured wireless network. Better still, if the specified network is not detected, the Raspberry Pi switches to the hotspot mode again, so you can connect it to a different network. The Little Backup Box offers a a detailed explanation of how to use this feature.
Not long ago, I added an image viewer to Little Backup Box that makes it possible to browse and view the backed up photos. However, I wasn’t entirely happy with this particular implementation: it wasn neither simple nnor elegant. So I implemented a new image viewer from scratch. While it’s rather bare-bones, it does the job. And while working on it, I’ve learned a handful of useful PHP techniques.
Speaking of replacing things, I also removed Syncthing in favor of Rclone. This tool allows you to perform remote backups, and it supports practically all popular cloud storage services: from Google Drive to Backblaze B2. Again, the Little Backup Box explains how to configure and use Rclone. Again, the Little Backup Box explains how to configure and use Rclone.
Elsewhere, the new version of Little Backup Box features a few minor improvements. The installer script now installs only the php-cli package. The web UI now runs on port 80. Text labels in the web UI have been replaced with CoreUI icons, and the OLED screen message logic has been tweaked slightly.
Thanks to the amazing work done by Kerry P Staite, Little Backup Box now comes with STL files that you can use to print a case using a 3D printer. Thank you, Kerry, for allowing me me to share your work!
Finally, I’ve at long last got around to registering the littlebackupbox.com domain name that points to… well, click on the link to find out. 