Backup Software for Ubuntu

[c5vetter]

Okay, not sure if this is a valid question or not - what do you sages use for automatic back-up of your systems? Most of the programs are Windows-based and do not see how they could be used? (i.e., Carbonite; Second Copy, etc.) Or, is this something that Ubuntu One can be used for? Or, something else inherent within Ubuntu? Or, is this something folks do NOT worry about?

[mamamia88]

Okay, not sure if this is a valid question or not - what do you sages use for automatic back-up of your systems? Most of the programs are Windows-based and do not see how they could be used? (i.e., Carbonite; Second Copy, etc.) Or, is this something that Ubuntu One can be used for? Or, something else inherent within Ubuntu? Or, is this something folks do NOT worry about?

Well everyone needs to worry a harddrive failure can happen on any os. I personally just use dropbox for important documents and keep my music on multiple mp3 players. If something was to happen I just copy the music back and install dropbox. Drobox gives you 2gb for free which is plenty for word documents and pictures

[Megaptera]

Everyone should back up no matter what o/s they use. At least two backups of important stuff as a minimum - and stored away from each other either in the ether or in your house. Two back up tools spring to mind as a starting point ...
I think Deja Dup is in Ubuntu(?) https://launchpad.net/deja-dup or if you want to backup o/s and your settings - Clonezilla http://clonezilla.org/

I'm sure others will add more ....

[gordintoronto]

Good question! I don't use an automatic backup. Somewhere around here, I have a 250 GB hard drive which contains my historical "good stuff." I don't bother with backup of downloaded videos; if they all disappeared, I would say, "oh, well." I use Dropbox for the stuff I'm currently working on, which means it gets synched to my other computers.

The downside of Dropbox: if I delete a file, it gets deleted everywhere.

[mastablasta]

yes, ubuntu one can be used as backup (5GB free). as mentioned these kind of stuff is syncronised. so delete it here it get's deleted there as well if you let it sync automaticly. aside from Ubuntu one & dropbox, you have spideroak (encrypted files).

anyway to perform automatic backups at home to external disk you can use rsync (or Grsync if you prefer a gui). you can set it to automaticly perform regular scheduled backups.

a few other options are already mentioned dejadup, clonezilla and redobackup (i think basically a clonezilla with a much nicer interface).
there is also "back in time" and similar tools.

to be super safe you would have 2 disks in RAID and synced. so if one dies you would replace it and then data would automaticly copy form the good disk.

[justincarter]

You know, It is very critical to take backup of system on an on-going basis. If you are using ubuntu , you can use many software program depending on your requirement. You can try PYBACKPACK.

# apt-cache search pyback pybackpack - user friendly file backup tool for GNOME # sudo apt-get install pybackpack # pybackpack

[Not Defined]

I use deja-dup. It has a decent interface and is very simple. You can either get it by running, 'sudo apt-get install deja-dup' or by finding it the Ubuntu Software Center. It uses rsync so it is very similar to Time Machine on Mac OSX.

[uc50_ic4more]

I use Deja-Dup to keep a copy of my entire /home partition on an external drive that is left disconnected from the machine and unplugged from power when not in use. This mitigates against software screw-ups as well as power surges/ outages. To mitigate against theft, fire, floods, etc. that might destroy both my machine and the backup drive I also keep a copy of important stuff in Google Drive and Amazon S3 accounts. I keep config, preference and other system files in my U1 account.

[cortman]

I don't bother with backup software- I've found it to be more a pain than it's worth to me.
I wrote my own script that simply copies the important folders out of my home directory to a compressed folder on an external hard drive. It always keeps 5 old backups on the HDD and deletes the rest. Just add it to a crontab to make it run automatically.
Although honestly I usually just manually copy/paste any more.

[mikechant]

One thing I used to do but don't anymore is compress data. My reasoning is that nearly all 'large' files are already efficiently compressed internally by specialist methods relating to the data they contain (e.g. mp3, flac, videos etc.). And the remaining files are relatively so much smaller that compressing them gains very little. Meanwhile, the disadvantage of compressing files into an archive of some sort is that any corruption could lose the entire archive (maybe 1000's of files) whereas backing up indivdual files without compressing them means that data corruption will most likely only affect a few files. Also, it's a lot easier to restore specific files (deleted accidentally etc.) from a backup of individual uncompressed files.

I just use commands of the form

sudo rsync -av --progress [source] [destination]

stored in a script file.

The -a flag is important for backups since it preserves all the file attributes so you can restore the system to exactly how it was at backup time (date/time stamps, permissions etc.).