Jayce
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Hello friends. I recently (re)discovered a backup application that I have not used in years. When I first used it, it seemed nice, but it had some rough edges. At the time I just resorted to rsync where I've stuck by it ever since, because, well, rsync is freakin amazing. At any rate, a Linux friend of mine recently brought this topic up and told me about how much he was liking Back In Time, so I decided to check it out.
The development seems very active of Back In Time, which is a nice bonus. I grabbed the PPA for it since the version in the repos seemed old (1.0.10). The PPA brought down 1.0.23, and in fact, hours later it brought down 1.0.24. Nice! Anyway, the big difference I saw between the .10 and .23 release was the inclusion of SSH, which is downright awesome and a borderline requirement for my uses. Since I already had SSH keys set up (ssh-keygen, enterenterenter, ssh-copy-id user@ip.of.your.server), using SSH through Back In Time was easy since I didn't have to worry about it being passwordless... since it already was passwordless.
First, I'll get into another backup application that I think is absolutely awesome, but I feel it has some shortcomings. That application is Deja Dup. Deja Dup is based on Duplicity, and Duplicity is based on rsync. At the core, it's amazing, but as you build upward, there are some things I'm not exactly thrilled about. Please keep in mind, this is strictly my opinion. Deja Dup is the most simplistic backup application in existence for Linux, and one I still highly recommend. It's just not one that fits my needs entirely.
Duplicity basically will take your data, slice it up into 10MB increments, compress it, and send it along to the destination. Deja Dup also takes a fresh backup every so often to ensure there is no corruption in this backup process. That's where I get a little miffed, because in Deja Dup, you can only auto-remove older backups using two settings - 6 months, or 12 months. What if I only want 30 days of backups? As a result, my wife's 30GB backup ended up at just over 400GB on my server. Likewise, I cannot break open the data to see what's inside and what's changed without restoring it, since as I mentioned, it's all compressed blobs of data. On top of that, let's say you have a 750GB HDD, with 600GB in data you want backed up. Since Deja Dup does a fresh backup "every so often" to eliminate corrupted backups, this means every so often you'll be sending 600GB to your destination. In my case, it's a home server. 600GB through random intervals on a wifi link isn't something that excites me. If this was a once and done thing, great, but at certain intervals, ehh... On the plus side, Deja Dup will automatically pause and resume if you shut down your computer, suspend it, etc., so there's at least a bonus here, despite (what I consider to be) a few shortcomings.
With Back In Time, it basically takes a snapshot of your backup directories. Then from there it does incremental backups. You can specify any number of intervals to back up. Every 5 minutes? Fine. Every 2 hours? Every day? Once a week? All there. Likewise, you can also set up auto-remove parameters, so I can have the application auto-remove older backups based on what I specify. The other nice thing is, since it doesn't slice up your data and compress it by its own methods, I can see what each backup interval contains before I even restore it. That way I can click on today's backup, browse it, yesterday's backup, browse it, etc. I can even restore individual files if I don't want to pull an entire backup. That way if I nuked a file and several backups already ran, I can page through the older snapshots, find the file, and restore it. If I want to restore an entire backup, I can choose restore to simply have it go back to where its original location was, or I can restore it to a custom folder. Different use cases here with endless possibilities all within an easy to use utility.
At any rate, I'm really liking this backup program. It does not come up with continual prompts or notifications. It just kind of works. In fact I had forgotten that I was still set to back up every 5 minutes (when I was testing it), and I fired up the application to find it had been running 5 minute backups all day without me even realizing it. It's definitely a set-it-and-forget-it backup solution.
While we're on the topic of backups, I'll make a slight derailment from Back In Time as I'm curious how some users here are backing up their data. I've gotten burned too many times to let a simple backup program or simple backup script stand in my way of redundancy, so I've taken steps to ensure that if anything in my server blows up, the data is still safe. This week, I somehow managed to fry my 2nd SSD in my server, which contained my root partition for the OS. I know, crazy right? Out of frustration (and out of spare SSDs), I put in a WD Blue to run my OS partition. Thanks to me tar'ing my entire /etc nightly, I had all of my configs backed up. I grabbed my laptop, sat on the deck, had a nice cold drink next to me, SSH'd into my server, and copied/pasted all of my configs over. In about 10 minutes, I had my video surveillance running, ownCloud, web, file, print, backup, music streaming, video streaming, everything. Hard to complain with that.
Likewise, I have a 2nd file server on my LAN. My main server rsync's the most important data to the 2nd server (a nettop) in certain intervals. Below is the basic synopsis of the hardware.
pluto
i3, 4GB RAM
1x160GB WD Blue for /
2x3TB WD Red for /media/storage in RAID1 mirror
pluto-II
Intel Atom, 2GB RAM
1x500GB HDD
Every night, /etc on pluto is tar'd with a date stamp and rsync'd to my 3TB array as well as pluto-II. Likewise, twice a day all documents, pictures, ownCloud files, video surveillance feeds, and the most important data is backed up to pluto-II as well.
Thank you, rsync, crontab, and simple bash scripts that allow me to have a fully automated backup system. Do yourselves a favor... if you're not running any backups now, ask yourself - can I delete this data and still be perfectly fine? If the answer is no.... well you get the idea.
The development seems very active of Back In Time, which is a nice bonus. I grabbed the PPA for it since the version in the repos seemed old (1.0.10). The PPA brought down 1.0.23, and in fact, hours later it brought down 1.0.24. Nice! Anyway, the big difference I saw between the .10 and .23 release was the inclusion of SSH, which is downright awesome and a borderline requirement for my uses. Since I already had SSH keys set up (ssh-keygen, enterenterenter, ssh-copy-id user@ip.of.your.server), using SSH through Back In Time was easy since I didn't have to worry about it being passwordless... since it already was passwordless.
First, I'll get into another backup application that I think is absolutely awesome, but I feel it has some shortcomings. That application is Deja Dup. Deja Dup is based on Duplicity, and Duplicity is based on rsync. At the core, it's amazing, but as you build upward, there are some things I'm not exactly thrilled about. Please keep in mind, this is strictly my opinion. Deja Dup is the most simplistic backup application in existence for Linux, and one I still highly recommend. It's just not one that fits my needs entirely.
Duplicity basically will take your data, slice it up into 10MB increments, compress it, and send it along to the destination. Deja Dup also takes a fresh backup every so often to ensure there is no corruption in this backup process. That's where I get a little miffed, because in Deja Dup, you can only auto-remove older backups using two settings - 6 months, or 12 months. What if I only want 30 days of backups? As a result, my wife's 30GB backup ended up at just over 400GB on my server. Likewise, I cannot break open the data to see what's inside and what's changed without restoring it, since as I mentioned, it's all compressed blobs of data. On top of that, let's say you have a 750GB HDD, with 600GB in data you want backed up. Since Deja Dup does a fresh backup "every so often" to eliminate corrupted backups, this means every so often you'll be sending 600GB to your destination. In my case, it's a home server. 600GB through random intervals on a wifi link isn't something that excites me. If this was a once and done thing, great, but at certain intervals, ehh... On the plus side, Deja Dup will automatically pause and resume if you shut down your computer, suspend it, etc., so there's at least a bonus here, despite (what I consider to be) a few shortcomings.
With Back In Time, it basically takes a snapshot of your backup directories. Then from there it does incremental backups. You can specify any number of intervals to back up. Every 5 minutes? Fine. Every 2 hours? Every day? Once a week? All there. Likewise, you can also set up auto-remove parameters, so I can have the application auto-remove older backups based on what I specify. The other nice thing is, since it doesn't slice up your data and compress it by its own methods, I can see what each backup interval contains before I even restore it. That way I can click on today's backup, browse it, yesterday's backup, browse it, etc. I can even restore individual files if I don't want to pull an entire backup. That way if I nuked a file and several backups already ran, I can page through the older snapshots, find the file, and restore it. If I want to restore an entire backup, I can choose restore to simply have it go back to where its original location was, or I can restore it to a custom folder. Different use cases here with endless possibilities all within an easy to use utility.
At any rate, I'm really liking this backup program. It does not come up with continual prompts or notifications. It just kind of works. In fact I had forgotten that I was still set to back up every 5 minutes (when I was testing it), and I fired up the application to find it had been running 5 minute backups all day without me even realizing it. It's definitely a set-it-and-forget-it backup solution.
While we're on the topic of backups, I'll make a slight derailment from Back In Time as I'm curious how some users here are backing up their data. I've gotten burned too many times to let a simple backup program or simple backup script stand in my way of redundancy, so I've taken steps to ensure that if anything in my server blows up, the data is still safe. This week, I somehow managed to fry my 2nd SSD in my server, which contained my root partition for the OS. I know, crazy right? Out of frustration (and out of spare SSDs), I put in a WD Blue to run my OS partition. Thanks to me tar'ing my entire /etc nightly, I had all of my configs backed up. I grabbed my laptop, sat on the deck, had a nice cold drink next to me, SSH'd into my server, and copied/pasted all of my configs over. In about 10 minutes, I had my video surveillance running, ownCloud, web, file, print, backup, music streaming, video streaming, everything. Hard to complain with that.
Likewise, I have a 2nd file server on my LAN. My main server rsync's the most important data to the 2nd server (a nettop) in certain intervals. Below is the basic synopsis of the hardware.
pluto
i3, 4GB RAM
1x160GB WD Blue for /
2x3TB WD Red for /media/storage in RAID1 mirror
pluto-II
Intel Atom, 2GB RAM
1x500GB HDD
Every night, /etc on pluto is tar'd with a date stamp and rsync'd to my 3TB array as well as pluto-II. Likewise, twice a day all documents, pictures, ownCloud files, video surveillance feeds, and the most important data is backed up to pluto-II as well.
Thank you, rsync, crontab, and simple bash scripts that allow me to have a fully automated backup system. Do yourselves a favor... if you're not running any backups now, ask yourself - can I delete this data and still be perfectly fine? If the answer is no.... well you get the idea.
