Backup software

filburt1 · 12-17-2006, 03:29 PM

What software would you recommend for the following requirements? It will be used to automate backups about 250 GB in size.

Can run automatically (ideally daily at some time like 3 AM when there's nothing else running)
Supports external USB 2.0 drives
Runs on SuSE Linux 10.1 (32-bit)
Easily allows for restores in the event of some catastrophe that requires reformatting the system's internal hard drive
Has some sort of GUI rather than everything being done through configuration files or the console.
Lets me specify what directories to back up, which could be on multiple partitions and multiple physical drives.

It will back up a 500 GB internal hard drive (about 250 GB of which is in use) as well as some directories like users' home directories and the contents of /srv.

Thanks for any suggestions.

pajamabama · 12-17-2006, 07:20 PM

Have a look at KDar. It's a KDE frontend to dar, the disk archive utility. It does full and differential backups. I know that you can configure it via the gui, but then export a dar command that you can use in a cron job to schedule it to run regularly. I don't think it configures cron for you, and I've never actually done it myself, but I don't think it's that hard.

Mithrilhall · 12-18-2006, 12:29 AM

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=44998

filburt1 · 12-18-2006, 12:26 PM

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried out KDar, defined five backups (/srv, my home directory, /var/lib/pgsql, /var/lib/mysql, and the big 500 GB drive), exported them all as cron jobs to be run as root so permissions don't become a problem, and they all seemed to run fine--and surprisingly quick given how much data was involved. I turned off compression given a lot of what I'm backing up (music and videos) is already compressed.