[Ubuntu-US-CA] recommendations for backup tool

[Grant Bowman]

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:57 AM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been using sbackup (http://sbackup.sourceforge.net/) on Ubuntu
> for some time now. It is simple and works ok for what I want to do. In
> Lucid, the backend still works but the frontend is broken
> (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sbackup/+bug/550261). Some
> suggestions are to move on to nssbackup
> (https://launchpad.net/nssbackup), the proposed successor to sbackup,
> although they say its a fork, but does not share any code(?). The plus
> with nssbackup is that its compatible with sbackup.
>
> Then there is deja dup which looks interesting, esp. backing up to
> Amazon S3 (https://launchpad.net/deja-dup).
>
> What's the recommended Ubuntu way for doing backups?

Hi Sameer,

This is a good question and one that many users overlook.  Backup has
come to my attention a couple times this week.  In the unix world
people seem to keep creating their own solution over and over again.
I haven't used sbackup before but here's what I found.

It seems sbackup is a recommended solution.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem  However if it is
really discontinued then that documentation will need updating.

That bug doesn't have a ppa but a fix was checked in.  The patch is a
two liner you could probably apply to your system.  The last comment
has a workaround too, running sbackupd with sudo.  I don't know the
story from the MOTU packagers.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sbackup

Depending on the storage you choose and what you backup a few local
folks have created solutions for their own needs.  Some people use
Ubuntu One or DropBox to sync files, especially for config files that
they symlink into place.  Here are two other custom solutions.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mephistobackup
http://github.com/alexKleider/ripple

Cheers,

Grant Bowman
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam