Backup application in default install

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Hello all,

According to:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem
"Backup is essential."  However, no tool to backup the system is 
available in the default installation.

By contrast, Mandrake (as it was then) included an excellent simple 
option built-in when I used it around five years ago:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Howto/Drakbackup

I have just read through all of the Wiki pages I could find on the topic:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Home?action=fullsearch&from=0&context=180&value=backup
and it seems that each release brings a new spec to include a backup 
program by default and, each release, people write out the use-cases, 
set out the alternative backup programs available and argue about 
missing features.  Then the release happens and no backup program is 
installed by default.

Simple-backup-suite appears to be the most officially-sanctioned backup 
solution for the simple use-case and I understand that it was designed 
for Ubuntu (during the 2005 GSoC) for this purpose.  Unfortunately, the 
project does not seem at all maintained, which makes it unlikely that 
bugs will be fixed or features added. The facility to restore backups is 
also pretty primitive (as far as I can tell), requiring the user to 
search through each backup file one-by-one to find the correct 
version(s) of a file, rather than having any master indexes.

I would really like to see Canonical/Ubuntu officially support this 
crucial part of the desktop. There are so many choices for backup, each 
with subtle differences, that having a recommendation would be very 
valuable to all but the most skilled backup experts. Canonical/Ubuntu 
supporting one backup program would also no-doubt encourage further 
activity in that program. Finally, there could be excellent 
(revenue-generating?) opportunities to offer an option to backup to 
Ubuntu One etc.

I understand and appreciate the differences between the backup programs 
(some using inotify and hard-links, some using diffs and archive files 
etc.), but I feel that it is one of those cases where it is more 
important to encourage the user to backup the system in any of the 
available ways than to keep arguing about the most technically-correct 
approach.

Regards,

Aaron