Pigeon backup was made out of a basic need - to provide a simple, friendly and useful backup utility to backup all of my applications. Following the Keep it simple motto, i've resisted adding any fancy interface on top of the application, focusing instead only on the basic functionality.

The app is completely free for commercial as well as personal use, and the app is provided as is - without any warranty. Not sure if it's of any comfort, but I do use it everyday to backup my entire media collection (over 2 terabytes of data).

Please look at FAQ's to see some usage examples; or you can always use the "-h" option to show the help screen.

Pigeon backup contains three basic features - mirror, copy and zip.

• Mirror : Basically creates a mirror of your source directory on the target directory, delete all non-matching files on the target
• Copy : Similar to the mirror mode, except that it will *not* delete any non-matching files on the target.
• Zip : The zip mode will create a zip file out of the source directory.

To understand the options, just pass in the -h option and it will print out the usage.
for example : java -jar pigeon.jar -h

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How does pigeon copy files ?
A. Pigeon uses java native IO to copy files to the destination. It's significantly faster than regular IO to copy large files, and slightly slower for smaller files.

Q. How does mirror/copy mode detect file changes ?
A. Both mirror and copy mode use the modified date stamp to determine if the file should be copied over to the destination or not. If the datestamp on source file is different than the one on the destination file, it will be copied over. in addition, if the date-stamp is the same, but the file sizes between destination and source are different, they will still be copied over.

Q. Can you provide some examples on usage ?
A. The following examples should illustrate usage:

• java -jar pigeon.jar -source "C:\MyMedia" -target d:\myMedia -mode mirror

  This will perform a mirror copy from a directory c:\MyMedia to d:\MyMedia, overwriting older files as well as deleting any files on the target which do not exist in c:\MyMedia.



• java -jar pigeon.jar -source "\\ENGLISH-MEDIA\Volume_1" -target d:\Volume_1 -mode mirror -logname english-media.log

  This will perform a mirror backup from a network location on machine called "ENGLISH-MEDIA" and shared directory "Volume_1" onto a local drive "d:\Volume_1", and instead of using "pigeon.log" as the log file, will use english-media.log as the generated log file name.



• java -jar pigeon.jar -source C:\home -target e:\ -mode zip -zipname "Home_%DATE:~10,4%-%DATE:~7,2%-%DATE:~4,2%.zip"

  This will perform a zip backup from a source directory C:\Home into the drive e:\ and will generate a zip file called "Home_yyyy-mm-dd.zip" as it's file name (This example runs on a windows machine, for a linux machine the variables may be different).

Q. Exclude file list does not seem to be working in windows environment.
A. The exclude file list parameter is case sensitive, even on a windows. So you would need to find the name of the excluded file/directory list, exactly as windows reports it and put it there.

Please send an email to pigeon-support@jalpesh.com if you have any questions in using pigeon, and I'll try to answer them as promptly as I can.

Alternatively you can also visit the support forums for more information.

Pigeon is provided as is, and is completely free for commercial and non-commercial use. Please look at the license file for more details, or contact support if you have any questions.

The latest version of Pigeon is 1.1 and it requires JDK 1.5 or higher. Download the following jar file and run it from any directory you wish.

You can run pigeon by the following options java -jar pigeon.jar <options...>

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