Generally speaking, the automated tests are more stringent than what production use is going to require. So if you just want to do some backups and restores without first running the tests on your system, that's fine.

It's not a bad idea to run the automated tests on your system before trusting backshift for production use though.

To run the automated tests, you need at least one python interpreter located in one of the spots that ./this-interpreter knows about, EG:

• /usr/bin/python
• /usr/bin/python3
• /usr/local/bin/python
• /usr/local/bin/python
• /usr/local/bin/python2
• /usr/local/bin/python2.5
• /usr/local/bin/python2.6
• /usr/local/bin/python2.7
• /usr/local/bin/python3
• /usr/local/bin/python3.0
• /usr/local/bin/python3.1
• /usr/local/bin/python3.2
• /usr/local/cpython-2.5/bin/python
• /usr/local/cpython-2.6/bin/python
• /usr/local/cpython-2.7/bin/python
• /usr/local/cpython-3.0/bin/python3
• /usr/local/cpython-3.1/bin/python3
• /usr/local/cpython-3.2/bin/python3
• /usr/local/jython-2.5.2-r7288/bin/jython
• /usr/local/pypy-1.4.1/bin/pypy
• /usr/local/pypy-1.5/bin/pypy
• /usr/local/pypy-trunk-2011-06-26/bin/pypy