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There are a few decent back up solutions for new users out there like sbackup, but they still need some polishing and don't come by default. I think that the first step in fixing this issue would be to get one of these programs into main. The more exposer a program gets the more bug reports and fixes it gets as well.
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zarlino
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 14:33
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scp and rsync are already pretty useful. There is also a frontend to rsync named grsync.
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RainCT
(Ubuntu developer)
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 14:40
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I agree with Andrew, there are enough existing solutions, to just need some improvement and more publicity.
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MagicFab
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 15:25
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Kubuntu users have a default backup app called "Keep".
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What's wrong with "copy to" ?
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madman2k
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 16:01
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conduit might be an option too
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ropiku
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 16:10
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Is TimeVault alive ?
I haven't seen any progress lately.
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Estesark
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 16:35
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I believe very strongly that there should be a back up & restore manager, with GUI, included with Ubuntu distributions by default, and easily accessible through the System>Administration menu. While there are already commands and third party applications that could be used to achieve this, including a properly integrated manager with GUI by default would be far easier and a lot more obvious to new and inexperienced users.
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I'm not a n00b, and I'm not a genius, but I do feel like I know a bit more about what's going on under the hood in Linux than a lot of converts.
Still, I've been trying to figure out a nice simple way of backing up my computer and what not. Having something integrated would make it a lot nicer and easier for a lot of people.
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djs
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 00:14
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The existing solutions, though some of them are quite good, only allow backup to files on another filesystem. What we really need is something like Bacula to be simplified for desktop/workgroup usage. It can do everything just about anyone needs, it just needs a front end that makes it:
easy to set up:
choose storage mediums (disk, tape, dvdr, etc.)
choose what to backup (full system or just /home, /var, /etc)
choose on what schedule (on-demand only or automated)
easy to verify that it's working
Bacula already can generate some reports
There's already a monitor applet
easy to integrate tape drives
LTO-1 tape drives and media are cheap and plentiful now that LTO-4 is coming out. We should all be buying them on e-Bay.
easy to integrate removable drives (USB, Firewire, eSATA)
This is what people are the most familiar with for now at least
easy to burn backup 'volume' files to DVDR media (if not integrated burning).
easy to label volumes (tape, DVDR)
What we have to keep in mind here is that most desktop/workgroup users are going to quickly run out of disk space for backups or have a hard time keeping track of the USB hard drives and what happens when you want to backup a whole workgroup of Ubuntu and Windows machines? I think that's why we need something with some power under the hood and the ability to use tape.
Furthermore, it seems like some of the client/server backup solutions like Bacula and Amanda are starting to languish. Many projects require so much work just to get working and to keep moving with bug fixes and new features that the polish and ease of use will always be a lower priority and thus they never reach the state required for adoption by non-technical sysadmin types.
So I see this as a call to arms for helping one of them, Bacula, thrive by bringing the necessary man power to bear on the usability factor.
If Windows NT 4.0 could include a 'does the job, nothing fancy' backup program in 1996, why can't Ubuntu in say 2009?
/djs
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clickwir
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 01:32
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Program is called Keep. Look it up. Been around for a while, it's graphical and easy to use. It can even schedule things for you. This idea is solved. Next ;-)
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Better yet, offer network backup as a (subscription?) service. I'd pay for this, I think, especially if it integrated seamlessly with my OS.
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Ubuntu has quite a few backup solutions. However, there may be a shortage of "grandma-friendly" interfaces for them.
I don't mind setting up rsnapshot or some other solution, but many users probably won't bother doing any backups unless it's simplified to little more than a single "enable backups" checkbox.
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I believe Simple Backup is designed for this sort of thing. (the package name is simplebackup)
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I hate to say it but for amateur users having something like Leopard's Time Machine would be a big "selling point" for new users starting out in Ubuntu for the first time. I myself am a little envious of Time Machines clean look and ease of use (two things that Flyback and TimeVault arnt quite competitors in yet).
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hackel
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 04:30
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I agree that there are plenty of existing solutions for making backups, and that Ubuntu just needs to pick one to install by default, polish it up, etc.
What is missing is a simple option to make a kind of system-restore backup, one which will intelligently backup all (and only) the files which are necessary to re-create a working system during a reinstallation (e.g. /var/lib/dpkg/status, /etc, etc.). Then modify the installation routine to look for this backup (thinking CD or USB here) and automatically restore, installing all previously installed packages, copying settings that were in /etc, /var, etc., the previous home directory, but restoring the bulk of the system from the network/Ubuntu CD. Of course this would only work for packages currently part of the distribution, so it could perhaps also include an installation report that documented the non-ubuntu packages that were previously installed and could not be automatically re-installed. This would be very useful.
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I've been quite pleased with Flyback over the last couple of months. I haven't figured out how to set up the chron job, and I haven't set up offsite ssh backups yet, but I do use it to back up my file server from another computer on the network, using NFS. My technical shortcomings are relatively minor compared to the enormously smart basic layout concept of being able to navigate the filesystem back through time. That is exactly what backup should be.
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And don't forget that it's fairly hard for newbies to backup one's Thunderbird mail and restore it on another system. That should be a lot easier as well.
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esadie
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 09:42
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I have a requirement for something like iFolder but built into Ubuntu server and desktop
http://www.ifolder.com
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dullivan
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 09:59
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Do you've tried unison?
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jelly1
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 10:53
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I would like to see a better improvement of sbackup, it is a great program but you cannot backup to 2 locations and I haven't seen any new realeases yet. It would be great if a default backup app would come to ubuntu, where you could handle full backups and daily and a system backup like windows xp's system recovery.
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I'm looking super obvious and easy way of backing up my files. All these packages I've never heard of, I'll go and check out, thanks.
To add my feature requests, I'd like to be able to:
* backup my files, specifying which directory goes to where (my ~/media/audio directory goes somewhere different to ~/docs, and ~/workspaces doesn't get backed up. This should all happen transparently, and take into account of removable media, and preferably would not have to resort to looking at walking the directory tree on a timed basis (file events?). * Snapshots would be nice, but not essential.
* backup my UI configuration: Thunderbird plugins, accounts, Firefox plugins, settings etc; Tomboy wiki; keyring; wallpaper settings.
* backup my machine configuration: what packages I have installed; xorg.conf; passwd. Some of these will require small scripts to backup and restore, but that's ok. (see hackel's previous comment)
* create/discover new backup-plans for packages that aren't catered for out-the-box (e.g. eclipse plugins). These backup-plans, and my choice of them, should also be subject of a backup-plan.
* of course, encryption is built in, and on by default.
* of course, though "disk space is cheap", I don't want to be backing up stuff that is readily available from somewhere else, and I don't want to be backing up stuff that hasn't changed since the last backup.
Of course, I can restore some or all of a configuration/files from any particular time, all from the same gui. I may be prompted for sudo passwords, but only for things that need it - e.g. restoring packages.
And of course, it's drop dead obvious how to set it all up, and everything has a sensible default; but I should be able to customize the setup.
Dream tool? perhaps. That's what I like about writing feature requests.
Many thanks. Good idea for a feature request site.
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I'm a fan of keeping /home in subversion or other VCS. A streamlined way of setting this up could be handy.
KDE's Keep is a simple frontend to rdiff-backup. I wouldn't think it would be too hard to do something similar with (py)gtk.
http://jr.falleri.free.fr/keep/wiki/Screenshots
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ntetreau
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 15:24
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For those who like Simplebackup, check out Not So SimpleBackup. It is a fork of Sbackup and the developper has really improved on it. You get more feedback on the backup process, you can have multiple "Backup profiles", ftp, ssh, gzip or not, split files, etc.
https://launchpad.net/nssbackup
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ecr959
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 20:11
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After reading most of the above comments, I agree that there are a couple of good, graphical solutions to the "easy backup" request. Lets tell Canonical to pick the best one, and we can all start supporting it.
BTW i think Brainstorm is a really great way to get things started. Get Canonical to listen to average users like me.
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Time Vault was my first thought as well. It is usable and understandable, and offers good base for building.
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abinoam
wrote on the 2 Mar 08 at 23:06
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rdiff-backup does all the job for me! It's perfect! But, it was very hard to find it. I mean, I've tested a lot of other tools without success till finding rdiff-backup.
So, I agree with the Velvet Elvis opnion. An rdiff-backup gui front-end!
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It would be great if this backup program's GUI closely resembled that of Time Machine.
Time Machine is popular because of it's simplicity.
Possible duplicate: idea #362: Linux Time Machine
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pforhan
wrote on the 13 Mar 08 at 21:01
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Flyback is simple, and works great as an entry in Admin. If it could get cleaned up a bit, I'd recommend it as default for everyone.
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Home User Backup (hubackup package in Ubuntu) should do the job when it's done. For now, the backup works, but restauration has to be done manually (open the archive and copy files).
See https://launchpad.net/hubackup/
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uaneme
wrote on the 5 Jun 08 at 03:53
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A move /home utility that can pull /home data from an old drive to a new /home but also is able to migrate to a new /home drive (and keep the trashcan alive)
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asaz989
wrote on the 2 Jul 08 at 01:14
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I'd like to second all the suggestions up top to clean up and improve Flyback.
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feci
wrote on the 14 Oct 08 at 13:34
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Hello all,
I've looked into many backup solutions, like Keep, sbackup, grsync, but none of them offer the whole range of features.
I personally would welcome a backup tool with the following features:
* to be able to create full backups
* to be able to create incremental backups
* full and incremental backups should be possible to combine, e.g: create full backup every two weeks; and based on the latest full backup, create incremental backups every day (or hour, etc)
* to be able to do the backup thru SSH (can be done also thru SSH also locally)
* to be able to restore
* store the backups in an easy to access format, eg. .tar.gz, if something happens with the tool, it still would be possible to recover the data
* to be able to trigger the start of backup from cron
anything else would be plus.
If anyone decides to start a project in this direction, I would be more than happy to participate in the development and/or testing.
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pezzos
wrote on the 16 Oct 08 at 13:49
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For the backup, I'd like to have a dedicated partition and act like that :
For the system:
1 - during the installation, the user should be able to create a small additional partition
2 - at the end of the installation, the system will copy itself and will be named : default or whatever...
3 - during the system's life and at regular intervals, during an install or at the request of the user, the user could update the backup differentially and dated
4 - during a crash, choose the option "recovery" in grub and choose what backup use to restore at a particular date
It could be very useful to test Ubuntu alpha or beta release!
For the data system:
1 - during installation, the user should be able to create a /home partition to install again the system without losing his documents
and optional :
1 - at the request of the user, a partition could be created to backup user data
2 - user-defined important documents through an interface
3 - during the system's life and at regular intervals or at the request of the user should update the backup differentially (to tracking changes, useful in business) or complete (to avoid duplication)
4 - to retrieve the files, the user have to go into special interface and select the file to restore
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backup must be simple and effective. You shouldn't have to be a cli user to do it.
Ideal tool - allows complete backup to USB drive (example). This allows for that perfectly tweaked ubuntu system that finally has all the programs/themes you like installed.
If your hard drive fails, or you move to a new machine, you insert the ubuntu install CD and the external drive, it "see's" your backup, and asks if you want to restore all of the backup, just your data, or nothing at all.
Make backup and restore easy, please!
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pezzos
wrote on the 3 Dec 08 at 07:46
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Nice idea, USB Drive or USB Key must be integrated in this backup system.
But I think non-geek folks don't want to use a USB Key only for backup and the backup system have to be transparent so the HDD is the best place (in my mind) to put data. A complementary USB Key could be use to install Ubuntu with his own settings or backup/recover very important data.
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Isn't the perfect backup a custom liveCD creator + periodic personal files backup? That way you get back your installed aps as well, not just the data.
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I'm kind of new to ubuntu and still use windows as my main OS and any of my important files that need backing up are on the windows partition but take a look at allwaysync and secondcopy for windows. They are excellent backup programs which support making profiles, syncing of files or doing a 1 one sync (backup) which gives you options of what you can do with files deleted from the source and so on. The programs are closed source and I could not find anything open-source with these features which is too bad because they are really useful. Maybe there already is and I don't but there definitely needs to be something like that in ubuntu if you want people to fullty switch over.
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robbiew
(Ubuntu developer)
wrote on the 24 Mar 09 at 18:51
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We added Deja Dup to Jaunty (universe), and would appreciate any feedback (i.e. open bugs) users have on it. It has a simple interface, yet does some cool things, like allowing backups to Amazon S3. Deja Dup is by no means the "official" backup/restore utility for Ubuntu, however we are hoping that it could eventually get there...depending on the feedback we receive.
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I'm simply looking for something that does the following:
-Full backup
-Incremental backup
-Backup to DVD (I can get about 100 for $20)
-DVD backup must be able to SPAN dvds (I have 60+GB of data)
-Automated run, or at least a reminder ;)
-DVD identification (tells you what to label each disk)
-Restore a single file from any time between full backups (incremental)
-Easy full restore (insert disk 1, then 2, then 3, etc)
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pthivent
wrote on the 21 Apr 09 at 23:12
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OpenSolaris has a nice Nautilus extension for visualisation and browsing of ZFS snaphots (ZFS is a file system similar to solution #10): http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs
The Nautilus extension shown on the screenshots is so far the best UI I've seen to browse and manage snapshots: it's easy to use, easy to understand, but still powerful. This UI is superior to what TimeVault, FlyBack or Back In Time are offering. Maybe this could be reused in Ubuntu instead of reinventing the wheel another time.
Oh, for the record, note that the ideas for ZFS predate Apple's Time Machine: http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_on_your_desktop
Meanwhile, I'll give Déjà Dup a try. It looks nice for personal backup. But this project would need a bit promotion. I'd expect to find it when googling for "ubuntu + backup", not only in the above comment :)
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medigeek
wrote on the 28 May 09 at 21:54
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luckybackup will be included with 9.10 karmic :)
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medigeek
wrote on the 28 May 09 at 21:55
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> luckybackup will be included with 9.10 karmic :)
Not pre-installed, but available as a package
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Please add also an easy way to backup/move our "favorite applications" list.
So that we don't have to search&reinstall each of them when we :
-reinstal Ubuntu
-migrate to another PC
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