Best backup solution for Linux?

[pokerfan]

I just took a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/SimpleBackupSuite">SBackup but:

SBackup uses compressed archives, so it is not the best backup solution if you are primarily backing up large amounts of multimedia like videos, photographs, or music. These data types are already compressed, so you will spend lots and lots of time compressing these files with gzip with little or no space being saved.

Maybe what I need isn't even considered a backup but rather a mirror. Plus, it would be handy to be able to navigate the "backup" drive if only to verify that the data is really there. It would also facilitate recovery as I learned many years ago that 'backup' is only the first half of the process but that's another story.

[pokerfan]

1. Anyone ever used Conduit?

http://www.conduit-project.org

Conduit is a synchronization application for GNOME. It allows you to synchronize your files, photos, emails, contacts, notes, calendar data and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.

[RoyGBiv]

2. I dunno about best ...

"Best" depends on what you need done and what your setup is. There are many powerful backup and mirroring solutions for Linux, but most are overpowered for the single-machine user. That is, what they're generally intended to do is backup entire networks to a central server. That's not what it sounds like you need.

You've already got two things on your system that can accomplish basic backups, tar and rsync. The first creates an archive that can be compressed or not depending on the options. The second is more versatile. It, too, is generally intended for remote synchronization, thus the name, of file systems, but works just fine for local backups.

Tar is pretty straightforward. You could think of it as another ZIP, RAR, etc. utility except, by itself, all it really does is create an archive, i.e. a single file with all the files you elect to place there that can be compressed via gzip or something similar via options, e.g.:

tar czvf /data/backups/backup.back /home/$USER

would backup the entire /home directory of the specified user and place it within a file called backup.back. You can invoke various other options for periodic backups that works off this master copy, updating files that are new, deleting old files, etc. I use it within scripts for various purposes.

It sounds to me like RSYNC is more like what you want.

You could create a command or a script for this that could do a lot of things in an automated way, but there's a nifty GUI for rysnc called grsync. I believe in Ubuntu, all you need to do to get this is:

sudo apt-get grsync

IIRC, the menu option for it is stored in a weird place, under Applications > Internet.

Here's its homepage: http://www.opbyte.it/grsync/

And here's an page describing its use a bit more: http://theaddicted.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/how-to-backup-ubuntu/

It's fairly straightforward.

[pokerfan]

3. Thanks

I'll take a look at it.

[pokerfan]

4. This will work

I don't desire compression because:
1) the biggest files on my system are multimedia so compression would be redundant
2) storage is cheap these days anyway
3) I want to 'see' that my backups are really there. We were burned at work some years ago when we discovered that our commercial backup solution was good at "taking the reservation" but not so good at "holding the reservation" to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld.
4) storage is cheap (did I already mention that?)

My desktop has a couple of removable SATA drive bays so USB external drives are kinda superfluous (not to mention slower).

I think my "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategery">strategery" will be to synch my internal drive to a removable drive and then have a second removable drive that I can rotate through the safe deposit box at the bank. While I'm a big believer in off-site storage, I am too cheap to pay for a 'cloud' backup. (I already have the safe deposit box).

If both my house and my bank (twenty miles away) are destroyed simultaneously then I expect that I will have larger problems to deal with than the loss of some bits:

[RoyGBiv]

5. Good strategery :)

What you're planning on doing is almost exactly what I do.

I believe in redundancy, so I also have all my documents, Firefox profile, e-mail, and pictures backed up in tar files.

Next you may want to look into using the dd command. I don't know of a GUI for this. (Doesn't mean one doesn't exist, just that I don't know of it.) Its syntax is pretty simple, and it's used to copy/mirror entire drives, partitions, pieces of partitions sector by sector rather than by files and directories.

I use this to back up my master boot record and entire partitions.

Note: The syntax is simple, but it's not intuitive. It *seems* backwards, and you can end up writing over an entire drive you had actually intended to copy if you don't pay attention. So, before going at it, read some quick tutorials on its use and implement the examples. You'll find example commands for most conceivable situations.