Answers to: which backup tool ?

Answer by Ron

Ron — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:03:00 -0500

Simple Backup for local HDD to external HDD and CrashPlan Pro to go from your local PC to the cloud. $7.99 a month for unlimited space.

Answer by Ron

Ron — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 10:13:17 -0500

Try Simple Backup ( sbackup ) it works wonders for me.

Answer by ranton

ranton — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:53:12 -0400

I would recommend Duplicity which is by same primary author as rdiff-backup. It does incremental backups nicely and it supports S3 storage on the backend which is how I am currently using it. Plus restoration is pretty straightforward.

This is the site http://duplicity.nongnu.org/index.html

Answer by Ron

Ron — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:52:12 -0400


sbackup
rsync
bacula
amanda
clonezilla

..all of these and a few others are all good. It's just a matter of which tool you use. While the tool is important, no one here has mentioned methodology, which I'll recommend here.

Do a fully weekly backup and then daily incremental backups. So if you do a full backup on Friday and your system borks on Monday, you need only install the full Friday backup followed by the incremental backups of Saturday and Sunday to get back to where you were before the crash.

Have redundant redundancy that is redundant. In other words, have a RAID 1 setup, do your backups as noted above, and also have those same backups backed up not only locally, but off-site as well such as via an online storage facility.

Lastly...... the most overlooked and rarely ever done step of testing your backups!! Backups that are never tested are worthless. All too often times what happens is that a system crashes and it's only then that the person finds out that their backup schema has failed them because they never tested the backups before the system crashed.

All the geeky tools, scripts, etc are absolutely worthless unless the backups can be used to restore the system. There's many ways to bake the cake, but if the cake isn't edible, what good is it, ya know what I mean?

Answer by EricTRA

EricTRA — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:42:48 -0400

I recommend Amanda also. It's hard setting up but when you got it running it keeps on going. Amanda Backup

Answer by Eduard Malinschi

Eduard Malinschi — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:36:42 -0400

Hi, I'm using safekeep+rdiff-backup and it saved my neck when a RAID 5 broke (1 physical damage and one out of sync).

http://safekeep.sourceforge.net/index.shtml

Answer by pmarini

pmarini — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:13:19 -0400

One solution that seems to have been overlooked here is Amanda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Maryland_Automatic_Network_Disk_Archiver), it's quite popular and feature-full and its development is also supported for Enterprise-level systems.

There is always a trade-off in customisation if you use an off-the-shelf product, like the many suggested in these answers, but on the other hand you could have a simple set of scripts to deploy your own backup system, once you are familiar with the basic concepts of "rotation" like GFS where you have full monthly ones, weekly partial ones and daily incremental ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme

Compressors like zip or rar allow you to process only the modified/new files and at the same time save space. Also remember to keep a copy of really important data off-site, for instance on a CD at a friend's place or using one of those online (cloud) file storage services like JungleDisk

Answer by rahuldevalone

rahuldevalone — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:30:42 -0400

Dear ! Friend, You can also use DAR for backup.you can take differential backup,Full backup.

open following web links:-http://gradha.sdf-eu.org/textos/dar-differential-backup-mini-howto.en.html

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/DAR-Download-130423.html

                                Enjoy!

Answer by Dion

Dion — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:23:27 -0400

I can recommend Luckybackup: http://luckybackup.sourceforge.net/

Very easy configurable with GUI, based on rsync. Automatically makes cron jobs.

Answer by rndmerle

rndmerle — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:41:08 -0400

There are basically 4 ways to backup data : (let's say we have 1Go of data to backup)

1/ One backup of data using rsync. Pros : Fast. Only 1Go of space needed for backup. Cons : Only one backup.

2/ Multiple copies of data (using rsync or cp or tar or zip). Let's say we keep the last 4 weeks. Pros : Multiple aged backups. For each backup, you have the full directories structure of data. Cons : 4Go of space needed .

3/ Incremental backup (using tar or zip). Let's say we keep 1 full backup and 3 incrementals. Pros : Multiple aged backups. A bit more of 1Go of space needed. Cons : The incremental backups contain only the modified files, so it's quite difficult to find files you want to restore.

4/ Rsync + Hard-links (the best way imo). Let's say we keep the last 4 weeks. Pros : Multiple aged backups. A bit more of 1Go of space needed. Each backup contain the full directories structure of data. Cons : Slower.

How (4) works : It takes multiple full backups but, using hard links between files in backup N and files from backup N-1, it creates the illusion of multiple full backups. Actually the data is only stored in the first backup. The next backups are only links, plus differences (added files between backups).

Rsnapshot (command line) and BackInTime (GUI) work this way (4).

Answer by jpvrla

jpvrla — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:42:29 -0400

I recommend a backup expert tool(which suggests a commercial product) since you mentioned incrementals. I use a product from Acronis which has worked greatly for me in the past. It is intuitive and has many features including the ability to backup and restore dissimilar OS's for those who have have a dual boot option. I hesitate to recommend it now since it has gotten kind of pricey. The home backup product cost $50 and the plus pack is another $30 as opposed to the $35 I paid for both products about 3 years ago. If you consider your data very important that $80 may well be worth it.

FYI: generally speaking, backing up data is relatively easy but the recovery can be a bitch if you don't manage it properly.

Answer by Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:51:49 -0400

I've been liking Back In Time on my desktop very much. On the headless server(s) rsnapshot gets my vote.

Answer by Yaro Kasear

Yaro Kasear — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:45:48 -0400

I prefer writing a good shell script that uses rsync to send your backed-up data elsewhere.You can configure an array of directories and a network target URI, then write out a script that, in this order:

Begins a loop for each entry in the directory array.
Adds the contents of the current directory in the array to an archive and compresses it.
Loops to the next directory in the array.
Once the array's done, timestamp the backup's name.
Open an rsync connection to the specified network target and transfer the compressed archive to the specificed destination.
Delete the oldest archive (Possibly even a maximum amount of archives can be configured.) as it's not likely to be useful anymore.

This design is intended strongly for cronjobs. Maybe to fire off every other week to once a month, and is designed so that all the user has to do is configure what is backed up and to where the backups are sent. Could be a good use for a home file server, but it can even even send backups across the Internet if you so desire.

Answer by beachboy2

beachboy2 — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:44:51 -0400

rsync seems to fit the bill. If you prefer a GUI version of rsync, have a look at Back In Time.

http://backintime.le-web.org/

http://lifehacker.com/5212899/back-in-time-does-full-linux-backups-in-one-click

Answer by Jazz

Jazz — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 16:06:01 -0400

I would recommend sbackup: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sbackup

It is very easy to configure (provides a configuration GUI), and some of its features are:
- manual or automated backups
- purging of older backups
- a simple interface for configuring when to backup (uses crontab)
- include/exclude files and folders using paths, file types, file size, or regular expressions

Answer by jeremy

jeremy — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:02:25 -0400

It sounds like rsnapshot should satisfy most of your needs: http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/articles/Jeremys_Magazine_Articles/Backups_with_rsnapshot

rsnapshot is a Perl-based utility for saving snapshots of local and remote filesystems. It uses rsync and hard links to create multiple, full filesystem backups, yet only requires slightly more disk space than a single snapshot plus incremental archives.

--jeremy