18.04 sbackup

[mlnease]

Hello,

I've just manually upgraded to 18.04 and hit a brick wall at high speed.

Forever (it seems) I've relied on sbackup to reinstall files from one reinstall to the next. I now find that sbackup seems to no longer exist.

Can anyone suggest a way that I can restore my old files--saved in sbackup on an external hard drive--without sbackup?

I'd revert to 16.04 but assume that sbackup would no longer work there either.

Vexing.

Any advice?

Thanks in advance.

[TheFu]

I've seen sbackup, years and years ago. It used rsync with hardlinks underneath the sbackup script, right? So, on the backup media, there should be cleanly laid out directories with date-stamps. Underneath each, are all the files. Just use rsync as root to put back the files you want. cp should work too. Just be certain to do this as root and force permissions to be retained.

If sbackup isn't setup this way, I haven't a clue. Sorry. Have you looked at the backup areas?
You could boot off a 16.04 flash drive and use that to restore your files into the 18.04 storage. ;) Just a thought.

Lots of "backup tools" work similarly, back-in-time is one, but there are others. Very few Linux backup utilities put the backups into proprietary formats. Most use fairly simple, standard, backup files that do not require the front-end-tool for recovery. For example, I use rdiff-backup. It has a mirror (like rsync) for the last backup and all the prior versions are "gzipped diffs" from the newer backup. Restoring a version that isn't the last would be a slight hassle without rdiff-backup -r, but I know how to use diff and gzip. Restoring the last backup is possible using cp, scp, rsync, whatever.

[mlnease]

I've seen sbackup, years and years ago. It used rsync with hardlinks underneath the sbackup script, right? So, on the backup media, there should be cleanly laid out directories with date-stamps. Underneath each, are all the files. Just use rsync as root to put back the files you want. cp should work too. Just be certain to do this as root and force permissions to be retained.

If sbackup isn't setup this way, I haven't a clue. Sorry. Have you looked at the backup areas?
You could boot off a 16.04 flash drive and use that to restore your files into the 18.04 storage. ;) Just a thought.

Lots of "backup tools" work similarly, back-in-time is one, but there are others. Very few Linux backup utilities put the backups into proprietary formats. Most use fairly simple, standard, backup files that do not require the front-end-tool for recovery. For example, I use rdiff-backup. It has a mirror (like rsync) for the last backup and all the prior versions are "gzipped diffs" from the newer backup. Restoring a version that isn't the last would be a slight hassle without rdiff-backup -r, but I know how to use diff and gzip. Restoring the last backup is possible using cp, scp, rsync, whatever.

The is great, thanks. I've known for a long time that backup/restore was possible (even easy, I suppose) from the command line but sbackup was such a convenient GUI solution that I've grown dependent on it. I'll read up on the CLI you've recommended and report my results here.

Thanks again!

[mlnease]

I've installed rdiff-backup using

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install librsync-dev rdiff-backup
then tried

sudo rdiff-backup /home /media/mn/Seagate Expansion Drive
and got back

Fatal Error: Switches missing or wrong number of arguments
See the rdiff-backup manual page for more information.
I looked at the man page but this is a little (as in way) over my head; can you (or anyone) tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks for your time and patience.

grsync seems to answer my needs (very impressively I must say)--thanks TheFu for your help.

mn

[TheFu]

/media/mn/Seagate Expansion Drive
isn't the same as
"/media/mn/Seagate Expansion Drive"

Spaces in arguments always need to be quoted. Any special characters need to be escaped. Standard CLI stuff.

Might be smart to exclude cached and temp files and "special" files.

[mlnease]

/media/mn/Seagate Expansion Drive
isn't the same as
"/media/mn/Seagate Expansion Drive"

Spaces in arguments always need to be quoted. Any special characters need to be escaped. Standard CLI stuff.

Might be smart to exclude cached and temp files and "special" files.

"Standard CLI stuff." Right you are--thanks.