bigbearjake14424/the-great-escape

The Great Escape is a cross-platform desktop backup utility built in Python with a Tkinter graphical interface. The developer describes it openly as a personal learning project, built with the help of AI coding assistants to explore Python and desktop application design, and welcomes feedback and suggestions from more experienced programmers. The application lets you pick individual files and folders, or database sources, and bundles everything into a single compressed archive using the tar and xz compression tools. Before creating the archive, it can generate SQL dumps from MySQL, MariaDB, or SQLite databases, supporting multiple separate database profiles that can each be turned on or off. Once the archive is built, it verifies the file and then copies it to any number of configured local folders and uploads it to remote storage through rclone, a command line tool for syncing files to cloud storage providers. Older backups are cleaned up automatically, keeping only the five most recent archives that match a given naming pattern in each destination, without touching unrelated files. Beyond the core backup logic, the tool includes a fair amount of extra polish for a personal project: customizable interface themes, fonts, and colors, an optional system tray icon so it can run quietly in the background, and a built-in scheduler that can trigger backups automatically on a daily or weekly basis while the application stays open. Recent versions moved the internal code structure away from a large tangled class toward separate, focused service objects, one each for running processes, building archives, dumping databases, copying to destinations, and cleaning up old backups. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Raspberry Pi OS with Python 3.10 or newer, and needs the tar and xz command line tools available on the system, with rclone and database client tools required only if you use those specific features.