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The Ubuntu community has contributed 13716 ideas, 65290 comments, 1273844 votes

Idea #6526: Easy to use system for incremental backup and restore of user files (not system)



bug This idea is a duplicate of idea #1: Easy way of backuping/moving your documents and settings.
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Written by mp3phish the 6 Apr 08 at 19:08. Category: System.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Description
An automatic selective backup system should ship with Ubuntu by default. Currently no backup solution is offered. It should allow the user to choose: [Selective Backup] or [entire system backup]

"Selective" backup should let the user choose which files and/or folders to backup and contain the following features:

- Default to home directory, with sane exclusions (ie, ~/.cache, ~/.temp, etc)
- Allow the user to select any files and folders he/she wishes, and excluded subfolers/files
- User selects where to send the backup (CD-R/DVD-R spanning,hdd,network,etc)
- Be able to select between "incremental" or "full" backup.
- Allow that profile to be saved, and automatically run on a schedule(hourly,daily,etc.)
- An easy way for the user to run that backup profile on demand. Maybe an optional tray icon that you can click on to run the backup right then, and shows status.
- Optionally, send an email with the success/failure, and relevant details. Verify past backups now and then. The tray icon could turn red if the backup fails, and show green if OK. I think the user feedback loop is extremely important when doing automated backups.

If in the first step the user selects "Entire system", then just do the entire disk. This is easy as there are plenty of packages that already do this well.

What do you think?
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Comments
XVIIarcano wrote on the 7 Apr 08 at 07:27
i use grsync for this purpose and i think it is perfect, plenty of options, a comprehensible graphic interface and the possibility to save common tasks. The only downside is that you cannot do it on different folders at time (unless they are all subfolders of a same one, of course), and you cannot "exclude" something inside them (ex. all my home dir minus the desktop or such...).

holizz wrote on the 7 Apr 08 at 07:33
This would be a good idea. At the moment I do all my backups with SVN, Python, sh, and rsync.

I would be surprised if a general-purpose backup tool could replace my perfect backup system, but I'd love to contribute to something that had the potential to.

romu wrote on the 7 Apr 08 at 12:18
When I read your idea (and I'm just voted for), yes it's again a request for a "Time Machine" like utility.

"TimeVault" and "FlyBack" are pretty dead, I'm thinking about starting a new project to create such a software from scratch.

mela1 wrote on the 7 Apr 08 at 13:50
Checout sbackup 0.9-1 in the repositories. Never failed me yet.

mp3phish wrote on the 8 Apr 08 at 01:27
Romu: time machine is a program that backs up your entire hard disk. It is not a selective tool by any means (though there is a way to exclude a folder)

mela1: I'll check it out, though your suggestion (and the previous comments about it) are good enough reason to say that no solution close to the idea I posted are available or mainstream enough to be used as the default backup program, of which Ubuntu does not yet have.

holizz: I would love to do one in python and a RAD gui, then all you would have to do is have premade scripts with some variables, some check boxes, and a nice little RAD gui to insert the scripts into the crontab, and maybe even a little tray icon (if the user wants). That would probably be all you need to accomplish this task. It is the maintenance of the scripts when problems are found (or changes need to be made) that is the hard part for a single user. But I don't see how the maintenance would be that bad if it were a broader project.

I think the challenges to this project are: 1) having a sane default backup profile. 2) maintaining common exclude directories like caches and temps. and 3) allowing users to create their own backup schemes (or add to the default) a list of includes and excludes. and 4) the ability for it to burn to DVD, CD, network drive, external drive, etc.


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