Backup software that can clone a directory

[Wee_Guy]

Hi,

I'm looking for software that can backup all the files in my /home directory including hidden files.

I liked Lucky Backup, but it puts everything in a tar file, meaning that the backup fails if the file gets too large (4 GB I think). I would prefer to avoid using tar/archives anyway, as often I only need to recover 1 file from a backup (an archive holding my 50 Gb of data would take ages to open).

Does anyone know of a program or a way to get rsync or the like to copy all the files in a directory, including hidden files, into another directory ( so I end up with effectively a carbon copy of the original). Disk space is not an issue so I don't need to compress anything. I'm not bothered whether its a fancy GUI-based program or a rsync command, just so long as it can save my previous files from.... myself.


Thanks in advance for your advice

[mrmeee17]

Yes I would like to know this as well. I need something like WIndows' 'create a system image'. What would you guys recommend?

Thank you.

[DasEi]

take a look to unison, it does incremtal backups, too

also rsync is a very handy tool, see man rsync, it can also use ssh via network for this

for sector based cloning of a whole partition can use dd

[jrider]

Hi,

I'm looking for software that can backup all the files in my /home directory including hidden files.

I liked Lucky Backup, but it puts everything in a tar file, meaning that the backup fails if the file gets too large (4 GB I think). I would prefer to avoid using tar/archives anyway, as often I only need to recover 1 file from a backup (an archive holding my 50 Gb of data would take ages to open).

Does anyone know of a program or a way to get rsync or the like to copy all the files in a directory, including hidden files, into another directory ( so I end up with effectively a carbon copy of the original). Disk space is not an issue so I don't need to compress anything. I'm not bothered whether its a fancy GUI-based program or a rsync command, just so long as it can save my previous files from.... myself.


Thanks in advance for your advice

Grsync is a what I use. Its a GUI for rsync.

[Wee_Guy]

Thanks for the advice folks. I've not tried unison yet as Grsync looks quite promising. The only issue at the moment is getting it to run without permissions issues. I've only tried running it as root once and I managed to direct it to a random folder that had appeared in /media instead of the drive I was aiming for, resulting in the source HD copying data to itself for about an hour before I eventually noticed and facepalmed.

Going to try Grsync as root again later with the correct destination...

[merlin_ie]

well, i dont know if this will really help, but i think its along the right track. i use remastersys to backup my distro at least 3 time a week (so if i ruin the distro, i can just burn the iso and reinstall) and its worked perfectly everytime. kept EVERYTHING, even contents in trash lol. hope this helps

[Wee_Guy]

Thanks merlin_ie, remastersys is pretty cool. I might use it to image the whole system before updates or config file tomfoolery, but my user data changes much more regularly, so I intend to backup said data on its own more often. That way, I'm covered for pretty much anything. That's my plan anyway, so either remastersys or clonezilla will be used for the system files, but I need something that can clone my /home directory to another drive (Grsync looks like it might be a winner).

...With my plan now laid out, I seem to want something to go bad just to justify the time spent on this backup scheme... plus I can laugh at people who don't have backups without being hypocritical

[Irony]

In terminal do;

cd /home

cp -ax * /dir/folder

This will copy everything in your home folder to the folder of your choice (where /dir/folder is the actual path you choose)... yes it really is that simple. Note you can do this from your normal GUI, no need to go to shell. You will get an error about gvfs permissions but you can ignore it.

See; http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=416710

[KayakJim]

Duplicity works very well, especially if you have an Amazon S3 or other off-site storage account.

You could also look into Cloud storage like Dropbox and set it for your entire /home directory.

[Wee_Guy]

I don't want to use cloud storage, as although it does have its advantages, my connection speed would mean it would take around 2 and a half weeks to upload all 50 Gb to a server. I've got loads of unused disk space at the moment so I'm quite happy to just fill that with uncompressed archives.

I don't think Duplicity would work very well for local backups as it uses tar which fails when the tar file gets to 4 Gb in size.

Irony, thanks, that seems to work quite well, bar the small issue of it ignoring symlinks. Can CP replace symlinks with copies of the target file (with the symlinks name) ?