Backup application in default install
Aaron Whitehouse
lists at whitehouse.org.nz
Wed Jan 27 08:14:56 UTC 2010
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
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