Hi all,


I have a external disk drive to which I would like to backup my Ubuntu computer. I'm looking for simple backup software that's not ubuntu-specific, so that I can continue using the same software if I migrate from ubuntu to some other distro.

Anyone got tips on good candidates?

Best regards,
kenneho

I make a list of the installed software by the following command:

duplicity has been around for a good while now... the Ubuntu desktop backup software 'deja dup' is basically a GUI front-end, albeit with a limited sub-set of the functionality of the parent software. To the best of my knowledge its a python script that uses rsync and GNUpg to back up and restore files in a secure encrypted format. The 'unpacking' process can take a lot of temp storage space, though.

I recently used duplicity to back up some stuff from an Ubuntu 12.10 install and restore under openSuSE 12.2, so it does work across different distros just fine. I think most modern linux distros probably have duplicity available in their repos.

I have liked sbackup, but it is flaky whend doing an automatic backup up to another personal computer. The mnaual backup process works correctly. Please see my post here.

You can use tar to create full and incremental backups. There is also dar, star and rsync.

For security, you could simply back up to a luks encrypted partition. This would make recovery simpler, as you have the tools to mount it using any live USB distro. For example, suppose you only have one computer and the hard drive failed.

You will need to learn what not to back up regardless of the tool used. Such as /sys,/proc and /tmp.