Comments on: Evaluating Ubuntu Backup Solutions — the FOSS Way

By: tlo

tlo — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:26:51 +0000

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.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:41:33 +0000

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!

By: Donal

Donal — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:37:55 +0000

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.

By: Jimmy The Clown

Jimmy The Clown — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:00:45 +0000

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…

By: Vadim P.

Vadim P. — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:24:27 +0000

Human way: http://backintime.le-web.org/

By: Guy Thouret

Guy Thouret — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:29:00 +0000

@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.

By: Fevrin

Fevrin — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:51:11 +0000

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.

By: Mark Kropf

Mark Kropf — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:32:10 +0000

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

By: Mark Kropf

Mark Kropf — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:22:37 +0000

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.

By: Tommy Keene

Tommy Keene — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:19:20 +0000

@danger have you tried dropbox? getdropbox.com. Has a great linux client, and syncs with other systems

By: Danger Snaf

Danger Snaf — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:48:08 +0000

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.

By: Tommy Keene

Tommy Keene — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:56:48 +0000

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…