[CS-FSLUG] Backing up in Linux

[Eduardo Sanchez]

On Sunday 18 May 2008, Nathan T. wrote:
> Hi CS-FLUG members,
>
> One of the luxuries I've had in Windows is  backup software by
> Acronis, I've had a few opportunities on my (former) work machine as
> well as my home machine to test the software out both on backing up
> and restoring afterwards and it's always worked perfectly. I got bit
> in the backside when I tried to do the same in Ubuntu though, my
> FireFox and Thunderbird settings, bookmarks and e-mails were gone and
> I had to copy over the profiles from my Mac in order to get them back
> in Ubuntu.
>
> My mistake was relying on the backup software that was available in
> 7.10, there was something I think I had run into in Synaptic that
> seemed like a backup daemon specifically made for Ubuntu, when I
> upgraded to 8.04 by doing a clean install I couldn't find the
> software again, and when I tried to manually restore the back-ups the
> archives were incomplete incremental back-ups and no matter how I
> restored them I never had all the files to rebuild what I had before.
> I'd like to avoid having that happen again, but I'd also like to
> avoid having to get into overly complicated processes for backing up.
>
> Is there a simple program that can schedule incremental back-ups, and
> restore them afterwards. It's important that the software makes sure
> to adjust the permissions, since the backed up information may be
> migrated forward to a new version of whatever distribution I happen
> to use, it has to perform well whether I'm using KDE or Gnome, and I
> would like it to allow me to manually start a back-up if I feel there
> is important information that needs to be backed up asap.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions?
>
> BTW. Ubuntu 8.04 shows significant improvement over 7.10, I'd
> recommend it to anyone who's not already settled on another
> distribution or operating system. So far Ubuntu 8.04 looks solid,
> mature, and stable. I haven't tested the hardware support with all of
> my peripherals though (and probably won't since I primarily use
> Windows Vista).
>
> Thanks.
>
> Nathan T.
>
> _______________________________________________
> ChristianSource FSLUG mailing list
> Christiansource at ofb.biz
> http://cs.uninetsolutions.com

This looks like a job for cron and tar, and perhaps rsync. I don't 
recall the details, but you can check these links:

http://www.techworld.com/features/index.cfm?featureID=391&printerfriendly=1
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Incremental-Dumps.html
http://mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_admin/x2540.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/securing/chap29sec306.html

You can also look at Arnie:
http://furius.ca/arnie/

Putting some tar job in a crontab to enable a periodical repetition 
should be trivial, especially with a GUI utility such as kcron.

Blessings,


Eduardo

-- 
Prof. Eduardo Sanchez
Asuncion, Paraguay, South America
http://shadow.sombragris.org
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 The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
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