How are you guys backing up?

Jayce

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I've been a long time fan of rsync, so whenever I set up a new system at home I'd create a directory for that system on my storage drive and would rsync to it accordingly. Someone asked me yesterday why I use rsync and not rdiff-backup. After some discussion I began to consider that maybe rdiff-backup is the way to go. rdiff-backup essentially works like rsync in that it provides a current mirrored copy of the data, but it also contains deltas which are incremental changes of the data in question. That means I don't really ever lose my data. If I delete something on client and rsync, it's gone. If I delete something on client and rdiff-backup, I can still retrieve it.

After some testing, it seems pretty sweet. Last night I ran my desktop and my wife's laptop through the motions by simply running:

rdiff-backup --exclude /home/jason/.gvfs /home/jason jason@192.168.1.200::/media/storage/jason/desktop-ubuntu

The exclude is necessary because if I have any Samba shares mounted, they populate in .gvfs. If .gvfs gets caught in the backup process it causes a loop since it'll effectively back up that directory and all of its networked contents as well. Then /home/jason is the source with jason@192.168.1.200::/media/storage/jason/desktop-ubuntu being the destination.

If I run rdiff-backup -l against the destination directory, it'll show me which incremental backups are available. Then I can rdiff-backup -r (for restore mode) and list the date/T/time of the incremental backup to restore it accordingly. You can also run rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 5D /backup/destination/directory to remove all incremental backups older than 5 days, for example. In a short time I was beginning to see the benefits of rdiff-backup over rsync.

That being said, rdiff-backup doesn't seem to be the default answer for people. Most people will say they use rsync or rsnapshot. I got to wondering if any of you fellas use rdiff-backup without even giving it a second thought.

One thing I had trouble with was finding a GUI for rdiff-backup. I often like to find the GUI equivalent for whatever tools I come across in case people ask for it. With rsync, it's Grsync, etc. It seems easy enough to run the command through its paces though. I ended up just adding it to a bash script and added it to startup applications within Ubuntu, but you can just as easily cron it to run it at a specific time. It also appears as if you can back up an entire root file system, which is appealing to me on many levels, but I'm still looking into this to get more info on it before I test it on any root file systems.

It also appears as if rdiff-backup works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. This is obviously a sure fire +1. I haven't tested it yet, but I've definitely read references about it. Food for thought.

So, what say you, fellas? Any rdiff-backup users that I wasn't aware of? If not, what do you use to back up? Whether it's CLI or GUI based, I'm interested.
 
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So those are cloud back up services right? I just started doing backups a few years back when my wife use to use Windows and it corrupted her videos folder and she lost some videos of our son. I started do backups to a hard drive and this year I started using Ubuntu One which I like cause I can back it up and when I restore it will just put all my stuff back where I wanted it. What is different about those in comparison to Ubuntu One?
 
I haven't set up my backup yet for my Linux partition.
I have a couple long weekends coming up where I was going to fiddle with my choices.
In the research I have seen, the trend seems to be what you have encountered, lots of people using rsync and recently more people talking about rdiff-backup.
Can't wait to test them out.
 
For a long time I have been using rsync/scp or whatever for media directories that rarely/never change/only get added to whereas for stuff like documents I would use a "misc" svn repo.
From there application specific dumps are run into a backup directory and then system dumped to DAT tape.
More recently I have tried to improve on this with the net effect that I basically don't backup these days. Needs rectifying.
 
So those are cloud back up services right? I just started doing backups a few years back when my wife use to use Windows and it corrupted her videos folder and she lost some videos of our son. I started do backups to a hard drive and this year I started using Ubuntu One which I like cause I can back it up and when I restore it will just put all my stuff back where I wanted it. What is different about those in comparison to Ubuntu One?

Not necessarily. I mean, I'm transferring data via terminal to one system to another, but both systems I own and are in my house. I'm not sure that would classify as a cloud service. Ubuntu One is solid for backing up, but the limited space you get and my limited DSL upload speed would be agonizing to endure. If Ubuntu One does the job you need then there's no arguing that! I use it for backing up my cell phone pictures via the Android app.

For a long time I have been using rsync/scp or whatever for media directories that rarely/never change/only get added to whereas for stuff like documents I would use a "misc" svn repo.
From there application specific dumps are run into a backup directory and then system dumped to DAT tape.
More recently I have tried to improve on this with the net effect that I basically don't backup these days. Needs rectifying.

That's kind of a logical outlook, actually. Perhaps I should do something like that. Even something like Deja Dup might work nicely with my Documents or Pictures directory, whereas Music and Videos could be solid rsync contenders.

The more I use rdiff-backup the more I question how "sweet" it is in comparison to rsync. I was intrigued by rdiff-backup's proposed ease of use, but quite honestly rsync is really dang simple to use anyway. The only argument I could see with rdiff-backup's "easier to use because the most usable flags are the default behavior" is the fact that I don't have to select -a --delete in rsync. But quite honestly that's not something to lose sleep over. Couple that with the amount of time I spent trial-and-error to figure out how the excludes and includes work and it was kind of a headache. I also found out that rdiff-backup, while stable, is dead in terms of development. Most people suggest that whenever a bug does come out it's on the Windows side, which admittedly by the developer himself years ago the Windows side wasn't even 110% as it was in Linux quite yet.

I think what I'd really like is something like Deja Dup that just offers more functionality. I wish I could say back up daily, but delete backups older than 5 days, as opposed to the rather generic options it offers. The most frequent "delete old backups" section it has is monthly. I think I might end up using Deja Dup on my wife's laptop. It's pretty easy to use in the event she needs to restore something when I'm not around. The only thing is with Deja Dup redoing a new backup now and then, and her laptop being a wireless G one, a fresh backup can take a while - which is where rsync is nice since it's ALWAYS an incremental mirror. Hmm...
 
I use Ubuntu One mainly for the fact it runs great with my Ubuntu desktop and I know I could get better deals on something like drop box but I am not a developer and I feel like it is the best way to contribute to the desktop I have been using full time since 10.04
 
For my personal backup I use Acronis True Image. I usually make several backups - to the cloud, external harddrive and so on. I think the best way to backup is to create the whole disk image and in case of crash, I will be able to recover it very quickly. As I am not so sure of the clouds, i backup to several other places.
 
Lots of rsync for large stuff and cp -r for archiving my smaller stuff... websites, MC server, school accounts, etc.
 
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