Best local backup program for upload to cloud?

[Nio Wiklund]

Hi Basil,

I have used DRDOS too, and I liked it :-)

I suggest that you use rsync or cp to do what you did with xcopy.

rsync -Havn

or

rsync -Havun

show some useful combinations of options (remove n (dry run) after a
first test) and of course add source and target directory paths.

man rsync

contains a lot of information, but I think it is nice to get started
with something like the commands above.

The following script might do what you want in a much simpler way (using cp)
---
#! /bin/bash

echo simple backup script using cp -auv SOURCE[directory]...
DESTINATION_directory
echo cp -auv $*
echo press {ENTER} to continue or {CtrlC} to quit
read
cp -auv $*
---

But you can do so much more with linux. For example incremental backup
keeping several version. I don't think you could do that with xcopy.

Do you need many backup versions or is synchronizing (syncing) what you
want, do you want to remove files from the target (that are deleted from
the source)?

Do you need complete backups (cloned copies or compressed cloned copies)?

Best regards
Nio

Den 2014-12-08 10:34, Basil Fernie skrev:
> 
> In the Very Good, Very Old days when I used to personally build, sell,
> install and maintain my own line of desktop PCs (a mere sideline to my
> core business of writing and selling my own cost-control software for
> the construction industry) there was a very mean company
> called-but-not-named M$ that forced a horrible 16-bit operating system
> named MS-DOS onto almost all PC manufacturers in a way that was surely
> illegal, certainly immoral. It did not match any of my standards -
> ethical, functional, quality or economic - and I was delighted to
> discover an alternative named DR-DOS, from the Digital Research company
> that had provided the CP/M that controlled so many 8-bit micros. It met
> all of my standards, and after that I never sold a PC with MS-DOS
> preloaded. Just one example of its superiority: a command called xcopy
> (eXtended COPY), which did everything the M$ dupes wished "copy" could
> do but were forced to turn to Norton Utilities or similar to perform. It
> took many years before M$'s miserable "copy" came anywhere near.
> 
> To do a backup with xcopy was simplicity itself because of the
> command-line parameters that were available, documented clearly and
> on-line in less than 1 Hercules 25-line screen. For 10 years or more
> that was all I needed for shifting HDUs-full of files and directories
> around with a single command.
> 
> Xcopy failed to be updated for a 32-bit, let alone 64-bit, world and
> became less and less useful because of its addressing inadequacies. I
> moved to OS/2, and found command-line and graphical utilities that
> worked quite intuitively and effectively. OS/2 was great, although
> poisoned in the marketplace by the Evil Empire. Eventually I could
> resist the Win32 pressure no longer, and transferred to Window 2000
> Server, a fine but flawed piece of work. Graduated eventually to Win7,
> all the while keeping an eye on Linux to see if it was desktop-ready
> yet. With inexpensive 3G modems joining sort-of-usable printing via
> CUPS, I moved slowly into OpenSuSE, then 'buntus, and am now pretty well
> settled with Lubuntu and other Debian derivatives. (And I dabble with a
> wide variety of other distros. Distrowatch is a dangerous site!)
> 
> And I have not found a single simple way to do the simple thing that was
> the mainstay of my file management, for myself and my hundreds of
> clients, for more than 2 decades. Oh, I know that in 'nix a file is a
> much more complex thing than we DOSsers every imagined. Oh yes, I
> speed-read  coreutils.info  last night, looking for useful hints, all
> 18627 lines, of which almost 3000 lines are of /index/ for, pardon me,
> important /concepts/ which presumably you should be familiar with before
> you can select out the half-dozen you actually want to use. A
> 3000-concept learning-curve before you can decide whether and how to use
>   cp  (after reading at a guess 7 times as many screens for man cp as
> for the very-effective help-option for xcopy), cpio  or  backup? OK, I
> guess, if you want to become sysadmin for a university. But guess what:
> our DR-DOS tools managed to hide the potential complexity from us
> hillbillies very successfully 99.9999% of the time. Why should we expect
> anything inferior from Linux, and to be even more direct, Ubuntu setting
> its sights on the common users of a wide range of platforms? Yet more
> so, Lubuntu which is spreading the domain of Ubuntu even wider?
> 
> At least I learned that what I thought I wanted to do and I gather you
> want to do, i.e. to make backups, is not what Linux thinks I want to do.
> Nor is a Linux archive what I want to make, although it could be twisted
> to get halfway there. And  cp  may non-obviously be pressed into the
> next-door county, but getting it across the border into mine will
> probably require writing a shell-script. 
> 
> I thought about that for maybe 30 seconds (haven't tried bash or Python,
> my language of choice is C followed by C++) while I opened up a terminal
> and typed "man fc" and nothing was found. Meaning, I think, that there's
> an acronym open for implementation of a user-developed command (File
> Compare - yes, I know you can get  cp  to do this) which will be
> parametrisable to follow up the comparison (after user intervention, if
> needed, in dubious cases) with whatever backup/archiving process has
> been pre-planned. May as well put the research done to good use. Maybe
> it could even become feasible to pipe stuff through an interface to your
> favorite cloud?
> 
> Last remark: why don't Linux packagers like acronyms for naming
> utilities? (Copy Phile???!!! Goes off muttering to himself...)
> 
> All the best for your search, but remember Linux has a different take on
> backups.
> 
> Basil Fernie
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:03:37 +0200, John Hupp <lubuntu at prpcompany.com>
> wrote:
> 
>     I'm still working on a solution for the problems I raised in the
>     thread "A survey of GUI-based free online backup."
> 
>     I have swung this way and that looking for the best approach.  Time
>     and again, I have found something that is promising in one regard
>     but undesirable in another.
> 
>     Here is where I am right now. 
> 
> :
> :
> :
> 
>     Using Opera's mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
> 
> 
>