How to Get Support
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## How to Get Support

Cedar Backup is open source software that is provided to you at no cost. It is provided with no warranty, not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. However, that said, someone can usually help you solve whatever problems you might see.

If you experience a problem, your best bet is to write the Cedar Backup Users mailing list. [1] This is a public list for all Cedar Backup users. If you write to this list, you might get help from me, or from some other user who has experienced the same thing you have.

If you know that the problem you have found constitutes a bug, or if you would like to make an enhancement request, then feel free to file a bug report in the Cedar Solutions Bug Tracking System. [2]

If you are not comfortable discussing your problem in public or listing it in a public database, or if you need to send along information that you do not want made public, then you can write `<support@cedar-solutions.com>`. That mail will go directly to me or to someone else who can help you. If you write the support address about a bug, a “scrubbed” bug report will eventually end up in the public bug database anyway, so if at all possible you should use the public reporting mechanisms. One of the strengths of the open-source software development model is its transparency.

Regardless of how you report your problem, please try to provide as much information as possible about the behavior you observed and the environment in which the problem behavior occurred. [3]

In particular, you should provide: the version of Cedar Backup that you are using; how you installed Cedar Backup (i.e. Debian package, source package, etc.); the exact command line that you executed; any error messages you received, including Python stack traces (if any); and relevant sections of the Cedar Backup log. It would be even better if you could describe exactly how to reproduce the problem, for instance by including your entire configuration file and/or specific information about your system that might relate to the problem. However, please do not provide huge sections of debugging logs unless you are sure they are relevant or unless someone asks for them.

### Tip

Sometimes, the error that Cedar Backup displays can be rather cryptic. This is because under internal error conditions, the text related to an exception might get propogated all of the way up to the user interface. If the message you receive doesn't make much sense, or if you suspect that it results from an internal error, you might want to re-run Cedar Backup with the `--stack` option. This forces Cedar Backup to dump the entire Python stack trace associated with the error, rather than just printing the last message it received. This is good information to include along with a bug report, as well.

[1] See “SF Mailing Lists” at http://cedar-backup.sourceforge.net/.

[2] See “SF Bug Tracking” at http://cedar-backup.sourceforge.net/.

[3] See Simon Tatham's excellent bug reporting tutorial: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html .

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