What is Reddit's opinion of Back In Time?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I never had any faith in Deja Dup when, during my testing, it wouldn't find backed up files that I could see were there with duplicity.

I am a big fan of Back In Time: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime

It is regularly updated and worked as it should in my testing. As the site mentions, the documentation was a bit poor, but they are working on that, and the interface is pretty straight-forward anyway. There is a ppa for Ubuntu.

I'm not going to say this is the *best*, because that's always asking for trouble, but for a GUI tool that is easy to understand, BackInTime is my go-to. You could run it on a schedule, or you could run it on-demand.

https://github.com/bit-team/backintime

This. I've done the same without any issue, but backups are also important.

For Pop OS I use Timeshift for backing up my /root/ directory and I use Back In Time for backing up my /home/ directory.

Check out Back In Time, you might get ideas from there. It's written in Python 3 and using rsync too plus it makes use of hardlinks for snapshots. It's highly configurable and has a nice Qt5 UI.

Using BackInTime (rsync front-end), I have daily incremental backups of ~/ on an external, also encrypted (dm-crypt/LUKS, not encfs), hard-drive. I exclude my podcasts and downloads folder from the backup, because that's easily recoverable stuff that would take a lot of space in a backup for no reason.

In my plans is to also setup monthly full-disk images on yet another HDD, that will include / just to speed up recovery should by harddrive crash.

Just cping your home folder in irregular time periods, and without keeping diffs is technically a backup method, but a very inefficient one. If Ubuntu's backup program doesn't offer diffs, do try BackInTime, it's definitely worth it. If you insist on copying files, at least make sure you preserve file permissions (ie format your external drive in a filesystem that supports UNIX permissions - so definitely not FAT32, and better use rsync instead of cp).

https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1088

The tool is probably not officially abandoned but it is more or less in deep sleep.

>I'm looking for full system backup software

Personally, I would not back up everything but only personal data as well as important configuration files, as reinstalling the operating system is done pretty quickly. For this I use Borg myself (if you want a graphical interface, you can install Vorta additionally).

For backing up a full filesystem so it can easily be restored, I don't think you can beat the old favourites, dump and restore. Dump will copy an entire filesystem into a single file (optionally compressed) from which you can easily either restore the whole filesystem or selectively restore selected files. Dump also allows incremental backups, so you can take a daily incremental just to back up what's changed.

For more fine-grained backups (ie, backing up files that you might be editing a lot so you can get back to a particular point if you need to), backintime is worth using.

Whatever method you settle on, do make sure you keep your backups on a different physical disc if at all possible. That way, if your disc fails you won't lose your backups. And do test that you can actually restore from them - there have been too many occasions when people have thought they had good backups only to discover at the point a restore was needed that the backups hadn't worked.

If you want to be really secure, yes.

My own backup routine is a complete system backup before and after any major Manjaro update, along with incremental backups every night. With backintime automatically taking snapshots of selected files & directories (mainly in my home directory) every 15 minutes to secure most stuff in areas where I might be making changes.

From my understanding, this isn't a good idea. Technically, you could install the KDE desktop, then uninstall the GNOME DE, but this would likely muck u your system with leftovers and unwanted crap. Best to make a backup of your home folder with something like BackInTime, then do a fresh install of Kubuntu. You can install your programs and then restore your home folder.

I have LM 19.3 on my main driver, and on it I use Back In Time - I use the older repo version instead of adding the PPA. It the past I have used the MintBackup (aka, Backup Tool) and Déjà Dup (aka, Backup). MintBackup is my least favorite, but I like all three. I use Déjà Dup on my LM 20.x boxes. I am pretty sure all or front-ends for rsync, and all should work with your NAS.
https://github.com/bit-team/backintime

Another option is to use rsync. Here is a tutorial from Synology.
https://kb.synology.com/en-my/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_up_Linux_computer_to_Synology_NAS

Backintime

I have it set up to automatically take a snapshot of my home directory and other selected working directories through a systemd timer every 15 minutes. So if (no, make that "when") I cock something up, I can restore any earlier version through the GUI.

It uses a combination of rsync and linking to minimise the amount of space taken up on the backup volume (though by its nature it does consume a lot of inodes, so I have my backup filesystem created with a higher inode percentage than normal).

> - backup my whole system (excluding the home folder), in case I mess up system files (manually, maybe once a month)

Timeshift: https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

> - backup my home directory with incremental backup (manually too, maybe once a day)

BackInTime: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime

I've used both of these for years. They work as intended.

I use Back In Time to make backups of my home to an external disks. It takes care of deleting old backups and has the nice capability to hardlink unchanged files (like rsync's option "--link-dest=DIR"). Plus, you can access files in the backup directly - no special software needed. I find that is a bonus.

At some time in the past I had used dar which is also capable of doing incremental backups but needs more self written automation around it to fully implement a backup scheme.

Many people use BorgBackup which has deduplication but lacks access without BB software.

Easy.

Try this: https://rsnapshot.org/ Or this: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime

Both should be in your distro packages.

Or to build your own using rsync:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Note that guide was written before rsync got the --link-dest option. Use the link-dest option to replace the the cp -al steps

There are plenty of other guides in how to do snapshots with rsync. Chose a remote or local destination as you normally would. Be aware that snapshots need a filesystem that supports hard links.

To use with openvpn you would just need to set up the connection in the script, mount your nas via nfs and point rsync to that.

If you're hyper-paranoid about it, you could always create some aliases. For example:

alias mv="mv -i" or alias mv="mv -b"

alias cp="-i"

alias rm="rm -i"

Put these in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile (plus root's)

For backups to recover from this sort of thing, look into backintime which can keep huge numbers of incremental backups without using vast amounts of disc space because it links identical files through the generations rather than creating new ones. (It will use a lot more inodes than the average backup system though).

I have a scheduled job which runs backintime a few times a day to synchronise the external drive.

For my cloud backups, I have a watcher script which takes advantage of Linux's inotify functionality. This lets me trigger an action when a file is written to disc. So that script watches all the directories I use for photos and automatically triggers a copy to my cloud server whenever I save a file there.

I use BackInTime and find it very reliable (at least with the 1.1 branch).

Much more than DejaDup, at least last time I tested (one or 2 years ago, so it might be outdated).

Restoring can only be reliable because, in worst case, you can still find your files directly on the backup filesystem (if BackInTime restoring was buggy, which I never faced).

I faced a few minor bugs that are now fixed.

It's true that the encryption method (encfs) is probably vulnerable. There has been some work started to switch to gocryptfs (https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/644), but it seems stalled.

The main issue IMHO is the fact that there are very few recent commits.

What about https://github.com/bit-team/backintime ? I can't tell for certain, but it looks as though it doesn't backup the operating system, only home directory files. Maybe I'm wrong about that though. This is why I don't want to use rsync bc after looking into it more I've read that it only backs up files from /home

I don't think there is an official way to downgrade, but maybe you can find something through the Almighty Google. In any case, downgrading is certainly an even less stable procedure than upgrading, with many potential issues. If I was in your position I would bite the bullet and reinstall, after backing up all personal data.

If you want to do system backups to avoid/remedy similar situations in the future, I recommend Timeshift. For backups of personal data I use/recommend Back In Time.

Last point: I hope you're aware of the kernel bug that affects Ubuntu 17.10. If not, stay away from Ubuntu 17.10 (or anything with Linux kernel 4.11 or newer...) unless you're sure your system is not affected.

Same for me. I do very few custom configurations as root so I only backup my home folder. Reinstalling a distro and applications is so damn easy in Linux It's hardly worth the time and storage to backup my entire OS.

AFAIK Debian doesn't have a default backup program, but I like Back in Time.

For my laptop, I use Back in time with a docker rsync server with ssh running on my media server. This has worked well for me for close to two years but am waiting for gocryptfs to be added

That may or may not work. I'm not sure. I'm 100% POSIX. (Linux + FreeBSD)

Most of them are tools that use rsync under the hood. Rsnapshot is one I'd use for servers.

For desktop, I use Back in Time, bc of the GUI.

I have a FreeNAS server running a rsync module exclusively for backups. It runs FreeBSD, but it's functionally equivalent to a Linux server running rsyncd.

Those are the applications that would give you Windows Explorer-browsable filesystems. There are others that have file formats that are easily accessible, though not immediately so, and would require tools other than the backup application to access if the backup app is not available. (duplicity)

Edit to correct my claim of 100% Linux.