Evaluating Ubuntu Backup Solutions — the FOSS Way
I have something to confess. I don’t keep regular backups. If the hard drive in my laptop was to fail I’d have a serious problem. I would be faced with the very real risk of losing weeks, maybe even months worth of work. What I need is a backup solution for my Ubuntu desktop that works with me. Here is how I found that solution and it was much easier than I had first thought.
First, I have a couple of requirements:
- Backups need to occur transparently. If I have to remember to execute a script or start a program to initiate a backup then chances are I’ll probably forget and that would defeat my efforts.
- Data needs to be backed up to either a USB drive or to a network share depending on if I’m working in the office or remotely.
Rsync
Naturally, my first consideration is to any FOSS backup utilities and one that immediately springs to mind is Rsync. A quick search found that there is a graphical interface for Rsync called Grsync. This can be easily installed using ‘apt-get install grsync’ and a few minutes later I have an icon in the applications menu to launch it.
The Grsync interface is clean and simple. There is an option to select the source folder, one to select the destination folder and an execute button. You can also add multiple ’sessions’ that are each a saved configuration so I could have a session that backs up to the USB drive and a session that backs up to the network share and switch between the two to achieve my goal.
Rsync works by only archiving files that have been modified since the last backup was made so while initially it may take a little time, any subsequent backups should be much faster. I found the interface doesn’t add any functionality to the command line rsync, so backups can be initiated by just entering the command rsync [source] [destination] and this in turn can be added to cron to periodically execute backups in the background.
There are some drawbacks however. Rsync will only backup entire folders. Within the folder I want to backup are a couple of folders of large image files that would take up too much space on my USB drive. With no easy way to easily exclude files and folders this is unfortunately not an option to me.
Sbackup
The next utility I tried was Sbackup, installed by ‘apt-get install sbackup’. Sbackup was developed through the Google Summer of Code initiative specifically as a simple backup tool for Ubuntu. It installs two programs in to the System -> Administration menu. These are ‘Simple Backup Config’ and ‘Simple Backup Restore’. Sounds simple enough.
The interface is simple too. The first screen has three options, recommended, custom and manual.
The recommended option backs up all user files (/etc, /home, /etc/local and /var) to /var/backup and is ideal for a casual user who needs an easy way to backup data to the same disk. Also by default, any iso images and media files are excluded as well as hidden thumbnail, trash and metadata folders that don’t need to be backed up and would otherwise slow down the process.
The custom setting allows you to fully configure any directories and individual files to be included in the backup and also exclude individual directory paths, file types or files that exceed a maximum size.
The backup location can be either a directory on a mounted file system or a remote location using SSH or FTP, but the best thing about this utility is that it can be easily configured to run weekly, daily and hourly just by selecting from a list. That is it, just press save, close the Simple Backup configuration utility and it will just run silently in the background incrementally backing up your precious data.
Ubuntu makes it easy
Within 20 minutes of starting my search I had a complete backup solution installed and configured and all thanks to the power of having thousands of packages available from the Ubuntu software repositories. I was able to quickly and easily test out different solutions until I found one that worked with me.
This is the FOSS way. I urge you to try it and find your own solutions that work with you
Contributing blogger Guy Thouret is a software engineer for a wireless energy management system company. He has used various GNU/Linux distributions since 2002.
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Note that Simple Backup Suite is mostly abandoned, and development is currently at “Not So Simple Backup Suite” (https://launchpad.net/nssbackup), which will replace SBackup at an indefinite point in the future:
https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/nssbackup/+faq/360
https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/nssbackup/+faq/361
“Backups need to occur transparently.”
This is certainly true, but my biggest complaint about SBackup is that it FAILS transparently, too. If the destination is full, or the SSH password or permissions changed, SBackup will just silently fail and you won’t notice until you check on your backups and realize the latest one was made weeks ago. I haven’t actually tried NSSBackup, so maybe they added some notifications.
I have had great success with rdiff-backup. It works like rsync, but with a larger amount of control over what gets backed-up. It also uses versioning without any extra flags, is multi-system, and has a lot of other good features.
I’m surprised more people are not using it…
Hi,
I’ve been using spider oak, it backups your files online and you have 2 GB for free, for me it’s ok, 2 gb of data it’s a lot and it’s transparent, i would like to use mozy but it doesn’t work in ubuntu but in windows works great, well it’s just an option maybe you can fine it useful.
@danger have you tried dropbox? getdropbox.com. Has a great linux client, and syncs with other systems
Another interesting option is Quick Start. This is a set of utilities for Ubuntu that can be installed and offers a number of differing tools for Ubuntu. The current version is 7.0.2 and option 1 is Backup TAR, option 3 is backup/restore image ubuntu, with option 2 Restore TAR and option 4 the same as option 3, but from windows. Option 5 allows a backup schedule while option 6 is for Synchronizing folders and option 7 is for backing up or restoring system updates.
Additionally, option 9 allows house keeping-cleaning and option 11 allows DVD codec download (presumably with licensing considerations addressed).
The interface is simple, loaded into Applications>Accessories.
This would be a good program for any ‘newbie’ to consider and works well for those who find programing rSync somewhat daunting or r-diff an effort.
Addendum to above as the name makes for a problem with finding it in a Web search.
If interested in Quick Start, please go to http://quickstartdownload.pbwiki.com/QuickStart+help
Guy, rsync /does/ allow you to exclude by size with the –max-size= option. In Grsync, I believe you’re given a place to enter extra options like that. Whether that’s considered easy or not is up for debate, however.
@Fevrin
Thanks for the hint, I didn’t spend time looking into Rsync options as I was just quickly evaluating different solutions to find one that met my requirements but you are right, Rsync does allow exclusions by filename, path and max size with various switches.
Human way: http://backintime.le-web.org/
I’ve been down this road as well, and I completely disagree that sBackup provides a usable solution. Although it does incremental backups, it doesn’t make links or snapshots. Try doing a restore and you’ll see what I mean.
Here’s (an actual) use-case:
I run a backup with sbackup -> it creates a full backup
I delete several gig of files and add a couple new files
I run a backup with sbackup -> it creates a progressive backup
Now I want to restore my files, but I cannot restore to the state my system is in. I have to restore the full backup and then the partial backup on top of it. This ends up restoring a ton of deleted files.
A backup system is only as good as its restoration…
I had been using Sbackup but had to take it out.
I usually backup to a Rev 70gb drive which uses UDF file system so the utility has to able to handle that first.
However I’m often away from my backup drives. I found that sbuckup continued to run without notification and tried to put everything into root eventually consuming all root space.
What I want for backup is:
Full or incremental file level backups.
Ability to choose folders at the same level. Ability in include/exclude files. Granular Scheduling obviously.
imaging not necessary, I can use something else for that.
Sbackup as a recommended solution? Are you serious? I’ve tried it and the S appears to stand for Sh*t.
As a new to linux user I’m disappointed at the lack of simple, effective, easy to use backup software.
All I want is an on demand backup that is fully customizable with a decent gui, and (and this is a radical concept in the linux world) a progress bar!
Have to agree that sBackup is a shame. Our backup drive got turned off about a month ago and so it appears as a gentleman above said that the backups were going to our PC hard drive, filling it up. We did not know what the problem was and began getting errors that our 200 gb drive was full, which screwed up everything. I reinstalled Ubuntu confident that we had docs backed up with sBackup on our external drive. They were there, but I cannot get them to reinstall, open or unzip at all. Have tried with sBackup on fresh install of Ubuntu, via gksudo from terminal, and with 7zip on a Windows machine. Errors each and every time. I am very bummed. Will try the other solutions for future backup solutions. Thank goodness I had dragged over most of our stuff manually before setting a backup program, so we did not lose a lot, but enough to be a little cranky.