Best local backup program for upload to cloud?

[John Hupp]

On 12/5/2014 11:00 AM, John Hupp 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.
>
> Copy.com offers 15GB of free storage with a Linux client, but the 
> client is really just a sync program, and you have to place all your 
> files in a designated sync folder.  If you don't want to do that, you 
> could backup all your user files to the designated sync folder.
>
> Box.com offers 10GB of free storage.  They don't have a Linux client, 
> but they do support WebDAV.  So you need either a backup program that 
> supports WebDAV, or you can use davfs2 to map a local drive to the 
> WebDAV resource, and then back up to the mapped drive.  In either case 
> you need a backup program.
>
> So with either Copy.com or Box.com, the backup program is a critical 
> ingredient.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Notes on a couple of promising backup programs:
>
> Duplicity (say, with front end Deja Dup) has lots of strengths, but a 
> full backup should be run periodically, and you really don't want to 
> do that because of the difficulty of a multi-GB upload.
>
> Duplicity -- why a periodic full backup?  See 
> http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Cloud-Backup-with-Duplicity, 
> where it says:
>
>     /Thus, in principle, you could just create one full backup and
>     then use incremental backups for the changes. The developers of
>     Duplicity warn customers, however: Not only can a mistake in one
>     incremental part ruin the entire backup, but restoring files takes
>     quite a long time if the software needs to run through all the
>     incremental backups/.
>
> Duplicati 2 (based on Duplicity) overcomes that problem with an 
> approach that reliably merges 100KB diffs into an existing full backup 
> (a shameful imprecise description, but at least brief). The 100KB 
> chunk size keeps uploads reasonable.  It supports Google Drive, MS 
> Onedrive, and other destinations.  But the Linux version requires 
> installing Mono, which can run the Duplicati C# code that also runs on 
> .NET Framework under Windows.  This is convenient for a small project 
> to extend its platform reach, but it seems to me that it introduces 
> security risks, since .NET Framework malware does exist.  [Note: 
> Whether it poses a real risk is still under debate.  If the risk is 
> imaginary, then Duplicati 2, though still a Preview version, is the 
> best solution I have seen.]
>
> This may be an impossible spec, but I'd like to find a backup program 
> that:
> - will run in Lubuntu without installing a load of dependencies for 
> another environment
> - has a GUI (perhaps largely for the sake of Restores by average users)
> - doesn't require a periodic full backup
> - supports good encryption
> - supports compression
> - supports breaking the backup into nicely uploadable small chunks
> - is not buggy
> - preferably does auto-deletion of older backups, or supports 
> versioning, or will send an email when a backup fails
>
> If that is an impossible spec in the current state of affairs, I'd 
> like opinions on the best compromises.
>
> (I've been using SpiderOak, which has a nice Linux client and 2GB of 
> free storage, but that's not much storage these days, and I'd like to 
> hit on a better free solution that I can set up on systems that I put 
> together for people.)

I've wearied myself nicely, studying this issue for some days.

Some interesting nuggets:

Rsync and rather new front end Grsync are both very actively developed.  
Dirvish is another front end.  Rsync is of course very proven and widely 
acclaimed.  It is nonetheless a sync tool rather than a backup tool.  To 
use it for backup, you have to script a workaround that employs hard 
links e.g. http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups_2010.html and 
you would also have to script something to manage the full and 
incremental "backups."  Maybe one of the front ends knows how to handle 
those chores, but I have not read any mention of it.

Rdiff-backup is a back end that aims to provide mirror + incremental 
backup capabilities as part of its native design.  Sounds good.  But it 
doesn't seem to be actively developed, and there are some problems 
reported.  There have been a couple front end projects, both of which 
have been dormant.  But the Rdiffweb front end has a new maintainer with 
ambitious plans, including a 2015 new release 
(http://www.patrikdufresne.com/en/rdiffweb/).

In any case, when you are weary the thought of custom-scripting stuff 
(especially for a script weakling) or dealing with a buggy old back end 
seems extra daunting.  There is extra allure for something that just 
works, even if it is slightly off-goal.

So I returned to Copy.com, which I previewed above.  It turns out that 
you get an extra 5GB just for installing the Linux client, so now my 
free allocation is 20GB.  That's a lot!

It also turns out that you don't have to actually move your files to the 
designated sync folder.  Copy supports symlinks, so if in the sync 
folder you just create a symlink to your home folder, Copy will pick 
that up.  Cool!

Furthermore, Copy supports 30-days of file versions and also allows you 
to un-delete files.  Quasi-backup!

Copy is a product of Barracuda Networks, so though this service is 
relatively new, it has good backing.

So for the time being, I'm running with Copy.com.
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