Backing up.

[Paul Lemmons]

Paul Lemmons wrote:
> Knapp wrote:
>> Hello, I have been dumb for years and gotten away with it. Now I want
>> to start backing up my system.
>> What is the best software for this? Is there a system that backs up
>> only what you say and then every week or day or whatever does an
>> incremental backup perhaps linked to cron, so I don't have to think
>> about it? What is the best software?
>> Thanks from the backup stupid me.
>>   
> Looking for something myself I did a little poking around in Google 
> and found a couple helpful pages:
>
> Lists options with descriptions:
> http://linux.about.com/od/softbackup/Linux_Software_Backup_Solutions.htm
> http://www.foogazi.com/2008/02/25/free-linux-backup-solutions/
>
> On the recommendation of the second link above I tried the "Simple 
> Backup Suite"
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/SimpleBackupSuite
>
> Simple GUI for setup, backup and restore. Scheduled backups. 
> Incremental as well as full. So far it looks OK. I installed it, 
> configured it and started my first backup in about 10 minutes.
>
> That said, the backup has not finished and I have not tried to restore 
> yet. I will report back tomorrow.


The OP asked for something that was simple and GUI. I thought those were 
simple and reasonable requests. I live in the CLI world. It is what I do 
for a living.  But I really do like it when someone has made something 
difficult easier for me. I would rather spend time with my wife than my 
computer.

To that end I started looking for something that met that requirement. I 
found a number of options that were partially GUI or were designed for a 
network of computers or were setup to use tapes or DVD's but precious 
few that were simple to setup, execute and restore. These seem like 
no-brainers but I guess us *nix folks are supposed to love spending time 
with machines instead of having a life :)

So, as my original post described, I installed sbackup. So far it has 
worked well. It was a breeze to setup and just as simple to restore 
files. Everything was GUI with a simple to use interface. A simple 
solution for a simple problem.

Pluses:
- Simplicity
- Targeted for single user backup
- Uses disk for backup media
- Simple Scheduled backups
- Incremental as well as full backups
- Backup Files are compressed (tar'ed and gzipped)
- Backup drive is a USB drive. If it is not mounted it will not try to 
back up.
- Restores work
- Can restore to alternate location


Minuses:
- No notification of failure/success
- No "Unified view" of backup
   - You must search each backup, full or incremental for your file
   - Versions exist but not displayed together
- If there is a problem it dies quietly
- Does not handle failed permission problems
   - Runs with root access but even root can not always get to files on 
a network
   - Program actually crashes when this happens
- Restores are kinda slow from full backups
- Backup archive can exceed 4GB so will not work with fat32 drives

Conclusion:
I am going to keep it and quit looking for now. The simplicity and the 
fact that it directly addresses my need outweighs the minuses.

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