Déjà Dup

Déjà Dup is (from Ubuntu 11.10) installed by default. It is a GNOME tool intended for the casual Desktop user that aims to be a "simple backup tool that hides the complexity of doing backups the Right Way".

It is a front end to duplicity that performs incremental backups, where only changes since the prior backup was made are stored. It has options for encrypted and automated backups. It can backup to local folders, Amazon S3, or any server to which Nautilus can connect.

Integration with Nautilus is superb, allowing for the restoration of files deleted from a directory and for the restoration of an old version of an individual file.

Note that as of February 2016 this project appears to be almost completely ignoring bug reports with only minor triage activity and the last bugfix dates back to 2014, though there are new releases with minor changes.

Back in Time

I have been using Back in Time for some time, and I'm very satisfied.

All you have to do is configure:

• Where to save snapshot
• What directories to backup
• When backup should be done (manual, every hour, every day, every week, every month)

And forget about it.

To install (working on Ubuntu 16.04 for gnome):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bit-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-gnome

The program GUI can be opened via ubuntu search for "backintime".

Project is active as of August 2019.

rsnapshot vs. rdiff-backup

I often refer to this comparison of rsnapshot and rdiff-backup:

Similarities:

• both use an rsync-like algorithm to transfer data (rsnapshot actually uses rsync; rdiff-backup uses the python librsync library)
• both can be used over ssh (though rsnapshot cannot push over ssh without some extra scripting)
• both use a simple copy of the source for the current backup

Differences in disk usage:

• rsnapshot uses actual files and hardlinks to save space. For small files, storage size is similar.
• rdiff-backup stores previous versions as compressed deltas to the current version similar to a version control system. For large files that change often, such as logfiles, databases, etc., rdiff-backup requires significantly less space for a given number of versions.

Differences in speed:

• rdiff-backup is slower than rsnapshot because of its need to calculate delta files. There are ways to speed it up, though, like the --no-fsync and --no-compression options.

Differences in metadata storage:

• rdiff-backup stores file metadata, such as ownership, permissions, and dates, separately.

Differences in file transparency:

• For rsnapshot, all versions of the backup are accessible as plain files.
• For rdiff-backup, only the current backup is accessible as plain files. Previous versions are stored as rdiff deltas.

Differences in backup levels made:

• rsnapshot supports multiple levels of backup such as monthly, weekly, and daily.
• rdiff-backup can only delete snapshots earlier than a given date; it cannot delete snapshots in between two dates.

Differences in support community:

• rdiff-backup has seen a lot of recent development and bugfixing activity. From December 2019 till spring 2020, rdiff-backup was re-worked into version 2, which supports Python 3.

Supported file systems:

• rdiff-backup supports all unixoid file systems. FAT32, NTFS and HFS+ are supported too. As of today (July 2020), there are still problems with exFAT.

rsync

If you're familiar with command-line tools, you can use rsync to create (incremental) backups automatically. It can mirror your directories to other machines. There are lot of scripts available on the net how to do it. Set it up as recurring task in your crontab. There is also a GUI frontend for rsync called Grsync that makes manual backups easier.

One very useful example is:

rsync -vahP --delete --backup-dir ../$(date --iso-8601=minutes) <source directory> <destination directory>

Among -vahP, the -a flag is important, as this preserves file permissions and recurses into subdirectories. --backup-dir stores changed and deleted files in the specified backup directory, which is conveniently named after the current date and time.

The idea below stores changed/deleted files with a suffix, which carries the current time/date:

rsync -vahP --delete --backup-dir ../backup --suffix .$(date --iso-8601=minutes) <source directory> <destination directory>

Though rsync is very fast and very versatile, only the last backup can be easily restored in an obvious way.

Another way to preserve deleted files would be using hard links.

See:

• http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups_2010

Duplicity

Duplicity is a feature-rich command line backup tool.

Duplicity backs up directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local. It uses librsync to record incremental changes to files; gzip to compress them; and gpg to encrypt them.

Duplicity's command line can be intimidating, but there are many frontends to duplicity, from command line (duply), to GNOME (deja-dup), to KDE (time-drive).

Dropbox

A cross-platform (proprietary) cloud sync for Windows, Mac, and Linux. 2GB of online storage is free, with paid options. Advertised as a way to "store, sync, and, share files online" but could be used for backup purposes too.

Note that even on paid accounts revision history is limited to one year and on free accounts it is only one month.

Note also that restoring large amount of files may be very time-consuming as Dropbox was not built as a backup tool.

luckyBackup

It's not been mentioned before, so I'll pitch in that "LuckyBackup" is a superb GUI front end on rsync and makes taking simple or complex backups and clones a total breeze.

Note that this tool is no longer developed.

The all important screenshots are found here on their website with one shown below:

Note: As of 2021-01, the last release of luckyBackup was on 2018-11

BackupPC

If you want to back up your entire home network, I would recommend BackupPC running on an always-on server in your basement/closet/laundry room. From the backup server, it can connect via ssh, rsync, SMB, and other methods to any other computer (not just linux computers), and back up all of them to the server. It implements incremental storage by merging identical files via hardlinks, even if the identical files were backed up from separate computers.

BackupPC runs a web interface that you can use to customize it, including adding new computers to be backed up, initiating immediate backups, and most importantly, restoring single files or entire folders. If the BackupPC server has write permissions to the computer that you are restoring to, it can restore the files directly to where they were, which is really nice.

bup

A "highly efficient file backup system based on the git packfile format. Capable of doing fast incremental backups of virtual machine images."

Highlights:

• It uses a rolling checksum algorithm (similar to rsync) to split large files into chunks. The most useful result of this is you can backup huge virtual machine (VM) disk images, databases, and XML files incrementally, even though they're typically all in one huge file, and not use tons of disk space for multiple versions.

• Data is "automagically" shared between incremental backups without having to know which backup is based on which other one - even if the backups are made from two different computers that don't even know about each other. You just tell bup to back stuff up, and it saves only the minimum amount of data needed.

• Bup can use "par2" redundancy to recover corrupted backups even if your disk has undetected bad sectors.

• You can mount your bup repository as a FUSE filesystem and access the content that way, and even export it over Samba.

• A KDE-based front-end (GUI) for bup is available, namely Kup Backup System.

CrashPlan

CrashPlan is a company providing business backup, without plan for individual users.

Features

• 10$/month/device fee
• Triple destination data storage and protection
• Silent and continuous
• Generous retention and versioning
• Deleted file protection

I had considered a bunch of options and configurations (using rdiff-backup, duplicity, backup-ninja, amazon s3, remote server). What it finally came down to was simplicity.

CrashPlan is cross platform, but not open source.

It's also worth noting that with a (paid) CrashPlan Central 'family' plan you can backup all the computers you own.