which backup tool ?

martvefun — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 08:39:20 -0400

Hello,

I'm looking for a backup tool on my (arch)linux.

On the archlinux wiki, I've found this list : backup programs. There is so many program I don't know which one choose and when I search review on the web I still found several others which looks great.

I'm looking for something to do incremental backup (save disk space and time), easy to recover and manipulate the backups. I'd like something easily customisable to do stuff (with bash script maybe) like "save my system every week, delete after two months", "save my home folder every day except the following folders, don't follow the links (to the partition or another) but keep them", "do incremental backup every x and a full backup every y", "save x every day, delete after after a week but keep one backup one week, two weeks, one month and three months old",...

I'm using only linux so I don't need a cross-system solution.

I tried rsync some times ago. It's a great tool but I had problems to keep the users and permissions. Also rsync doesn't allow to recover something else than the last backup (stop me if I'm wrong).

I heard a lot about rdiff-backup but never tried. Advantage to be able to recover previous backup.

In the wiki, there is link-backup. Never heard about it but it looks great, I may test it. Someone knows it ?

Unison : seen some good reviews. It has bidirectionnal synchronisation (feature, I don't really need).

rdup : another unknown program (based on hdup, like duplicity but looks more powerfull). I like the spirit of the program "not invent the wheel again and again" so instead of doing the backup, it uses another unix tool to do that. It can do compression and encryption. Problem, it copy the full file and not the difference (but if one backup fail, it's not so much a problem them). If someone has tested it, I'd really like to heard comments.

What do you use and why ? Thank you to develop your point and explain the main feature of the program compare to another.

Questions Tagged With incremental

which backup tool ?