I'm after an open source backup solution for my home FC5 desktop box. On Google, I've found AMANDA, BackupPC and Bacula, amongst others, but these seem to be orientated towards enterprise network backups. I'm after s/w to perform scheduled backups to an external disk drive, similar to what Retrospect does in the WinXP world. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Jon

This isn't hard to do at all. If you're just wanting to backup files and directories, just write your own script and stick it in the CRON.daily folder. If you want, I can share with you my backup script that makes full and incremental backups. I backup to an external hard drive daily.

Thanks, Micro - I'd be interested to see your script.

Take a look at Sbackup.

SBackup is a simple backup solution intended for desktop use.

I'm thinking of trying it myself.

Thanks, Fred. Looks promising...

I recommend faubackup, this is really space-friendly for unchanged files as it uses hardlinks on the backup device!

Would rsync work?

rsync is handy for shipping files to another server, but this is might not be a backup/restore solution for my home FC5 box. I'm assuming I can attach an external disk drive to a USB port as we do for our backed-up WinXP box, then run a cron job to perform incremental backups of specified directories, say, /home. When disaster strikes, and I still have the backup drive, I can restore backed-up directories after restoring the box.

I use

http://www.rsnapshot.org/howto/1.2/r...-HOWTO.en.html


There is also

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Comp...ecovery-HOWTO/
http://www.dirvish.org/
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
http://www.trickykid.org/index.php?itemid=4&catid=2
http://www.trickykid.org/index.php?itemid=7&catid=2

That is exactly what I do with mine, except I use Debian and it takes care of everything for me using apt-get install. All I have to do is setup the config file the way I want it to backup.

Back after a couple of days away...

I've downloaded Sbackup, and following the install instructions, I need python and python-gnome2 packages installed. On my FC5 box, python is no problem. Python-gnome2 is another issue - apparently it is a Debian package. After finding it, getting it, installing dependencies (gcc, gcc-c++, python-devel, pygth2-devel, glib2-devel, gtk2-devel, libgnome-devel), python-gnome2's configure script finally runs without errors. Back to installing sbackup, "make install" runs without reported errors (that I noticed).

Then, Applications -> System Tools lists "Simple Backup Config" and "Simple Backup Restore" options. Looking good, but when clicking either of these, I get "Failed to execute child process gksudo" Apparently, this is a package that Debian/Ubuntu users have, but seems unavailable for Fedora distros at this point in time...

For the moment, it looks as though sbackup is only a backup solution for Debian and Ubuntu, but not for other distros. A pity, because the facility looked very good. Or can anyone suggest how to fix the gksudo issue on my FC5 box? Has anyone got sbackup to run on Fedora?

Micro if you have time could you throw them scripts my way. I am currently thinking of just writing some scripts but pre written and modifed would prob. be easier

Thanks

Ok4life, Micro420 did not respond when I asked for the scripts...

As noted above, I couldn't get Sbackup to work on my FC5 box after days of effort. I finally gave up and deployed Rsnapshot - another suggested product, which is based upon perl scripts. Installation of the package, and hooking it up to an external disk drive, was completed in about half a day (including researching how to prepare the disk), and presented no difficulties at all. Nightly backups now run as scheduled cron jobs.

Rsnapshot might meet your needs. Let me know if you want the details on how I got this working.

Good luck

Than ks Jon I will be testing with RSnapshot it sounds like that should work. I will be playing with it this week. I don't think I would have any prob. pretty simply nightly backup with and mayb FTP weekly crontab. (I like off site)

JonBl, Can you please share this information to me. Thanks