I want to back up my Ubuntu linux. Currently I am using something called "back in time", not exactly what I want. What is a good backup tool that is easy to use.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Baccula is alright ( http://www.bacula.org/ ), but not the easiest thing on earth to setup. I'm a fan of simple rsync automated backups... no it doesn't have a gui, but it's so simple it doesn't need a gui.

You can easily make dated backups, incremental, exclude items, etc with just minor modifications.

/etc/buexclude
It's also about the easiest to restore system out there also. There are hundreds of articles out there on how to setup extremely simple incremental backups using rsync. Give it a google.

Actually rsync does have a GUI, it's called Grsync.

Take a look here.

How to backup/synchronize your files using rsync

rweaver:

thank you for the Rsync suggestion...It's already installed on my Ubuntu 8.1 distro (I looked in local synaptic), so it looks good so far. Now, my biggest question: from what I've read it's great for remote backups.

What I need is to backup "drive x" to "drive y"... both in the same Linux box, and I want to do manual backups (non automated)

Can I use Rsync for that??

thanks again!

Or you could use unison, which has some advantages over rsync (take a look at the description in synaptic for details). For images, you could use partimage.

axelfc:

Thank you for the GUI suggestion. I downloaded the file and now I have a desktop folder named /home/joe/Desktop/grsync-0.6.3. with a bunch of files in it.

I have had some problems with untarred packages before. I have no idea which file to run to open grsync. How do I get grsync to work?

Any suggestions are welcome and thanks again.

jay73:

Thank you for your reply.
I could not find unison anywhere in Synaptic. All I could find online was something called unison, but it is a disk file synchronizer.

I guess that would work too, but I am looking for a dedicated backup utility. Thanks again!

unison does both. I don't understand how it can be missing if you check synaptic. Maybe you should select a different mirror (System > Admin > Software Sources) because some mirrors are known to be incomplete.

One technique I used was to use a GUI program (KDAR was my poison) to set up the full and incremental jobs, and then export the job as a bash command. It is the setup which is the most difficult, but once you have the bash command that does the same thing, you can drop it into cron.daily/ for the unattended incremental backups.

Rsync doesn't care about locations, it works equally well to a drive as it does a remote host.

Where src is the location you want to backup, and dst is the location you want it backed up to.

So for instance--

Will backup the /home directory to the /mnt/backup directory. Just mount drive y and put it as your destination (make sure you use an appropriate location on disk y, like /mnt/backup/04-22-09 or /mnt/backup/pc1 then use that as the destination, if you use the same directory each time it'll only sync up the changed files, if you use a different directory each time (like a date) it will do a full backup of the src each time. )

joseph2020 you shouldn't download manually grsync. Isn't it in synaptic? Check the guide I wrote before. It has instructions on how to use both rsync from terminal and grsync.

How to backup/synchronize your files using rsync

rweaver has also given you instruction on rsync

rweaver:

it looks like I'll be trying rsync first, it looks simple and efficient.

so I should be able to do:
EX. 1
or EX. 2
EX 1 would backup Linux drive (sdb1) to backup drive (sdc1)...right?
Ex 2 would back up my home dir on sdb1 to backup dribe sdc1...right?

now, will you please tell me what "-av" and "--delete-after" mean and do? I tried to look at the man entry for rsync, it syas -v menas verbose, but most of the time I don't understand man very well. Actually, lately I've been thinking maybe I'm too stupid to use Linux.

I feel strange asking all these ultra basic questions...I have gone from understanding how to do almost anything in Win to understanding almost nothing in Linux. I am very thankful the Linux community is so forthcoming with help, I would be totally lost without you.

Thanks again for your help

axelfc:

I thank you for the info and the link. However, I am not yet smart enough to understand the article you pointed me to.

In the "old" Win days when I downloaded something I would unzip it and then look for a .exe or .com file. Now, I can't find anything that even has the name of the file I am trying to get.

I have a folder sitting on my desktop named grsync-0.6.3, and it has been untarred. so it has lots of file and a few directories in it. Do you have any idea what file I am looking for?

I do have instructions for compiling, is that what I need to do? there isn't a file i can 2x click to run grsync? When I untarred firefox and thunderbird there were files which I could do that with, but most of the time after untarring I have no clue what to run.

Any help on this would be appreciated, and thanks again.

Why the insistence on doing things the hard way? Sure you can compile but you have to know what that implies. More often than not, it requires you to obtain other files first or that thing won't even begin to compile. That will mean either
- searching the internet for those files (time-consuming)
- installing them through synaptic (convenient); but then you end up using synaptic anyway
Have you tried switching mirrors as recommended? Are you sure that it is not there? Try the Search function inside synaptic (Edit > Search) and make sure that the Sections button is selected in the bottom left corner or you won't see all of the available packages.
Now, you do not need to use a GUI; anything that is in synaptic can be installed from the command line through the terminal with:
sudo aptitude install package_name (thus: sudo aptitude install grsync)
and removed with
sudo aptitude remove package_name (which leaves the config files in place)
or even
sudo aptitude remove --purge package_name (which removes everything)
Aptitude has many more options; try man aptitude or aptitude --help in your terminal to read more.

jay73:

Thank you for your input!...presently, I'll try rsync, which is installed. Before, I asked for a GUI, but now wondering if that's really needed. I can use the terminal for this so much easier.

Thanks again for your help.