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What's a good backup program for Linux?

D

Deadjasper

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 28, 2001
Messages
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The one that comes with Mint is garbage as far as I'm concerned. It stops and waits for user input before proceeding when it hits an uncopyable file like a lock file. I need one that's smart enough to skip those and continue.

TIA :)
 
Timeshift works well if you are looking at scheduled snapshots. Stupid braindead to use.
 
Always thought timeshift was for system config only.

For the regular backups of my work data I use Back In Time. Basically a gui for the ol' rsync.

I also tend to do a weekly copy-pasta off-site and leave a trail of backups on my family's pc's. One backup is no backup. Funny anecdote: years ago one of my fellow students exclusively backed up all his work to a permanently connected usb stick, which naturally joined the non-recoverable-club when his computer crashed hard. To the surprise of no one he never finished his thesis.
 
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Years ago, I used Macrium Reflect Free on my Linux Mint 18.x install. I had to create a USB boot disk using Macrium on a Windows machine. A search shows:

While Macrium Reflect is primarily a Windows-based imaging and cloning tool, it can support certain Linux file systems (Ext 2, 3, 4) for cloning and imaging, but not natively XFS, JFS, or BTRFS.
 
I'm confused, if you're in linux the simplest way is to just run dd. Won't stop and wait for your input, and just runs. That's it. Set it in the crontab if you want it to automatically kick off.
 
Duplicati works well for file backups but doesn't support disk images. I'm still looking for one that's incremental or continuous instead of full like dd. Plenty more to test though.
 
Mchart said:
I'm confused, if you're in linux the simplest way is to just run dd. Won't stop and wait for your input, and just runs. That's it. Set it in the crontab if you want it to automatically kick off.
Click to expand...

For dd to properly work for backup purposes the filesystem on top of the device should be unmounted or mounted readonly.
 
Crap. :hungover: Still looking.

I tried Timeshift, thought I set it up correctly but after some time it told me that the destination disk was full and to add another. I went WTF, no way in hell could this be, The back up destination was a 1.6TB SSD. I checked and it was. How to specify EXACTLY what is to be backed up is as clear as mud so Timeshift is off the table. It's great for its intended purpose but that's all.
I also tried Backup Tool and ran into the same problem. So why the hell won't Linux allow you to specify EXACTLY what you want to back up? Makes no sense to me. And by EXACTLY, I mean just that, no ambiguity. :(
 
Deadjasper said:
Crap. :hungover: Still looking.

I tried Timeshift, thought I set it up correctly but after some time it told me that the destination disk was full and to add another. I went WTF, no way in hell could this be, The back up destination was a 1.6TB SSD. I checked and it was. How to specify EXACTLY what is to be backed up is as clear as mud so Timeshift is off the table. It's great for its intended purpose but that's all.
I also tried Backup Tool and ran into the same problem. So why the hell won't Linux allow you to specify EXACTLY what you want to back up? Makes no sense to me. And by EXACTLY, I mean just that, no ambiguity. :(
Click to expand...
The software you tried doesn't, Linux don't care whether you backup one file or the whole system. Kup probably does what you want, I'm certain other software does as well.
 
Deadjasper said:
So why the hell won't Linux allow you to specify EXACTLY what you want to back up? Makes no sense to me. And by EXACTLY, I mean just that, no ambiguity. :(
Click to expand...
Make no sense to you, because you don't understand what Linux is. Linux is a kernel. Programs are a separate thing. If you didn't find a program which does what you need, look again, and look harder.
That being said, rsync will do everything you need and more. If you don't know how to use it (it's command line tool), ask ChatGPT to help you, you will be surprised how much can it do.
 
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So I tried Kup, but looks like (at least the version I have, which should be fairly new on Arch) it doesn't support remote backup. Which, I guess is fine, just rsync the local backup to a remote server. But that's not what I wanted. Looked at bup (the backend which Kup uses) and couldn't figure it out without looking at a bunch of documentation...anyway, wanted a GUI, at least for day-to-day usage.

So I got deja-dup installed (frontend to duplicity iirc), set it up, and it's been plugging away since last night. Would probably have been done, but my uplink is pretty slow. Seems like it didn't ignore the directories I told it to ignore, but I'll have to wait until it's done to confirm -- it might just be indexing them. UI is a bit scuffed because it's a gtk app running in KDE, but not too bad.
 
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Borg is good. But it's all terminal based. No idea about graphical frontends.

I just run the script to back up and prune. If I need something I run a command to mount the backup as a FUSE filesystem, browse as normal.
 
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