In this article I am going to show you how to install and use the rsnapshot backup utility so that you too can have consistent, reliable backups for your Linux system – server or desktop.

Installation

Before you install you will need to make sure you have (at minimum) both rsync and perl installed on your machine. There are a few ways you can install rsnapshot. You can install from source by downloading the latest .tar.gz file (from the rsnapshot download page) and do the following:

1. Open up a terminal.
2. Change to the directory the newly downloaded file his being held.
3. Issue the command tar xvzf rsnapshot-XXX.tar.gz (Where XXX is the release number) to unpack the archive.
4. Issue the command cd rsnapshot-XXX to change into the newly created directory.
5. Issue the command ./configure.
6. Issue the command make to build the software.
7. Issue the command make install to install the software.

You could also download and install the pre-compiled binary (in .rpm, .deb, etc) form and install from that. Another way to install rsync is to the open up your Add Remove Software tool, search for rsync, and install from there.

No matter how you install you will wind up with an executable (rsnapshot) in /usr/bin/ and a configuration file (rsnapshot.conf) in /etc. You are ready to begin configuring your backup.

Configuration

All of the configuration for rsnapshot happens in the /etc/rsnapshot.conf file. Open that up with your favorite text editor (you will need root privileges to do so)  and get ready to get your hands  a little dirty.

Because everyone’s set up is different, I am only going to point you to the sections of the configuration file you need to edit for your needs. The configuration file is very well laid out, so you shouldn’t have any trouble with the configuration. But just in case…

The first section you will need to set up is the SNAPSHOT ROOT DIRECTORY section. This is where you define the location where your snapshots will be stored.

The next section (since we are installing this on Linux) is to uncomment out the cmd_cp directive under the EXTERNAL PROGRAM DEPENDENCIES section. Also, in this section, if you plan on using Secure Shell (ssh) for remote backups, you will need to uncomment the cmd_ssh line.

The next section is the BACKUP INTERVALS section. Here you have three (with an options fourth) options to set up:

• hourly
• daily
• weekly

The default is set up nicely like this:

interval hourly 6
interval daily 7
interval weekly 4

This means you will have six hourly backups (every four hours), seven daily backups (once a day), and four weekly backups (once a week).

The final section you need to configure is the BACKUP POINTS / SCRIPTS section. Here you are going to define what is to be backed up. By default rsnapshot will back up /home, /etc, and /usr/local to the locally defined backup point. You will notice after this section is a very well laid out section of sample backups. Take a look at these closely as they will help you create various types of backups (including remote backups).

Final step – cron

The last thing you need to do (after you save your configuration file) is to set up cron to run the rsnapshot tool. You will want to set up the root users cron for this (so Ubuntu-based distributions will use the command  sudo crontab -e) so issue the command:

crontab -e

and add something like:
0 */4 * * * root /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly
0 23 * * * root /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily
0 23 * * 6 root /usr/bin/rsnapshot weekly
The above will run rsnapshot hourly ever four hours, daily at 11pm, and weekly on saturday at 11pm.

That’s it. You’re backup is ready to go.

Final thoughts

Make sure you put some thought into your backup plan. After all, it will save you should a disaster strike. The rsnapshot tool is a very handy tool that can take the venerable rsync utility and make it far more useful.

Back In Time offers two GUI versions: One for GNOME and one for KDE. If you want to run the KDE version of the tool you will have to be running KDE >= 4.1. The difference between the GUIs is minimal, and there are no features on one that are on the other (it’s all in the different widget sets used.) In this tutorial you will learn how to install and use the Back In Time backup tool.

Installation

Installing Back In Time is simple. Go to the applications’ download page and download the necessary files. If you are installing on Ubuntu you will need:

backintime-common

and either:

backintime-gnome

or

backintime-kde

Before you can install this application you will need to first install the meld tool. To do this issue the command:

sudo apt-get install meld

Once Meld is installed you can install Back In Time. To do this you just need to open up a terminal window, change to the directory you downloaded the files into, and issue the command:

sudo dpkg -i backintime*

which will install both necessary files.

After the application is installed you are ready to start backing up.

Usage

To start up Back In Time go to the System Tools sub-menu of the Applications menu. There ar two entries: Back In Time and Back  In Time (root). You will want to run the non-root entry to back up your standard files.

Figure 1

When you fire up Back In Time for the first time you will be greeted, not with the main window, but the Settings Window (see Figure 1).  Before you can actually set up a back up you have to configure a backup directory. This is done in the General tab of the Settings window.

By default the Schedule will be disabled. This is fine if you want to do a one-time backup. But for scheduled backups you will need to select a frequency from the Schedule drop down.

You will also have to add at least one folder to back up. To do this go to the Include tab and add a directory to be backed up. You can, of course, add more than one directory to back up.

From within the Auto-remove tab in the Settings window there is a setting I highly recommend. If you check the “Smart Remove” check box Back In Time will:

• Keep all snapshots from today and yesterday.
• Keep one snapshot from last week and one from two weeks prior.
• Keep one snapshot per month for all previous months of the year.
• Keep one snapshot per year for all previous years.

If you have any need to retain snapshots, this is a fairly safe bet.

From within the Exclude tab you can configure Back In Time for folders and/or files to not include in the backup. You can also add patterns to exclude, which can include wildcards.

After you have all of your settings taken care of click OK and Back In Time is set up and ready to go.

What about that scheduled backup?

Here’s the deal – Back In Time does not have a Panel icon to keep the application running in the background. So unless you plan on keeping the application open, you have to have another means to make sure your backups happen.  In order to do this you have to know the command line portion of the tool. And then you will need to add the right command as a cron job. Without getting too complicated, the command to run Back In Time from the command line will be:

backintime -b

Which will back up any necessary job you have created.

With that in mind you can set up the backintime command to be run from your crontab. Say, for example, you want your backintime job to run every Sunday. You could enter a cronjob (started by issuing the command crontab -e) and enter a job like:

* * * * 7 /usr/bin/backintime -b

Save that cron job and it will be set up to run every Sunday.

Final thoughts

Back In Time is just as user-friendly as the other backup tools and adds a command line tool for added flexibility. I highly recommend Back In Time for your simple desktop backup jobs.

For most old-school Linux users, creating archive consisted of dropping to the command line and issue a command like tar cfz directory.tgz directory (where directory is the name of the directory to archirve). But new users fear the command line. So, thanks to GNOME, there is an easier way to achieve this.

The folder right click menu.

If you open up the Nautilus File Manger and right click on a folder you will see the menu shown in the image to the left.

By clicking the “Create Archive” entry a new window will appear that allows you to configure the archive you want to create. This new window allows you to configure the type of compression, the location and name of the archive, and (if you have encryption enabled), add encryption and split into volumes.

Configure your archive

Once you have configured your archive click the Create button and the archive will automatically be placed in the Location you chose.

Take note of the file extension. This extension will determine if the archive is compressed or not. There are eight possible options to choose from. If you want compression I would suggest going with either the .tgz or the tar.bz2 extensions.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve ever wanted simple and fast archiving, GNOME has just the tool for you. This method of archiving folders can not be topped for ease of use.

The good news is that burning CDs in Linux is very simple and doesn’t require the addition of third-party software. Let’s take a look at how to handle this job in a default GNOME 2.24.2 installation.

Where is the application?

Menu Entry

In the latest GNOME there is an application for burning CDs but you don’t really need to know where it is or what it is called. Why? If you click on the Places menu you will see an entry titled CD/DVD Creator.

Once you click on this entry a special Nautilus window will open that allows you to drag and drop files into the window for burning.

The Burn Window

Once this new Nautilus window is open you can drag and drop files from other Nautilus windows. Once you have added the files and/or directories you want to burn onto CD you just have to insert a blank disk into your drive and then click the Write To Disk button in the burn window.

Options

When you click Write To Disk you will then need select your device (if you have more than one), give the disk a name, select the write speed, and click Write.

A progress window will open during the writing of the disk. When the disk is complete the CD will eject and you’re finished.

Simple!

Final Thoughts

One of the only downfalls to this system is you can not burn ISO images. For that you will want something like K3B (check out my gHacks article “Burn CD and DVD Images with K3B“). Other than that, the GNOME CD/DVD burn process is as simple as it gets.

The script made use of the following tools: date, cat, tar, mv, and rm. That’s it. The script will create backups with the date in the file name and then move the backups to a central location. Without further adieu, let’s get to the script.

#! /bin/sh

TMP=”/tmp/”

#Format the date in YEAR-MO-DY format
TODAY=`date +%F`

# Check to see if there is a lastbackup file in /tmp, if not create it,
# if so then set LAST equal to $TODAY
if [ -f /tmp/lastbackup ]; then
LAST=`cat /tmp/lastbackup`
else
LAST=$TODAY
fi

# Set the web directory backup name to the following
WEB_FILENAME=”inc-”$TODAY”-web.tar.gz”

# Set database backup name to the following
DB_FILENAME=”inc-”$TODAY”-db.tar.gz”

# this tars up my web directory into web.tar.gz tarball.
/bin/tar -czf $TMP$WEB_FILENAME –after-date=$LAST /var/www/html

# Move the web back to the backup directory
/bin/mv $TMP$WEB_FILENAME /data

# Remove web backup file from temp director
rm $TMP$WEB_FILENAME

# this tars up my database directory into $TODAY-db.tar.gz tarball.
/bin/tar -czf $TMP$DB_FILENAME –after-date=$LAST /var/lib/mysql

# Move the backup database to the backup directory
/bin/mv $TMP$DB_FILENAME /data

# Remove web backup file from temp directory
rm $TMP$DB_FILENAME

What I wanted this to do is create daily backups and move the backups to the /data directory on the drive housing the server. These backups will be saved for one month. After the month is completed i have a second script that deletes the months backups prior to running the next backup (so there is always a backup to fall to). How I made use of this script is simple. I save the script (called backup.sh) in the root user directory and create a second script called rm_backups.sh that looks like this:

#! /bin/sh

rm /data/*gz

With these two files in place I create two cron entries. The first cron entry is for running the backup.sh script and looks like:

0 23 * * *     ~/backup.sh

The second cron entry is for running the rm_backups.sh script and looks like:

0 20 1 * *     ~/rm_backups.sh

Both of the above cron jobs are created as the root user.

Final Thoughts

Naturally this solution could be easily modified (using such tools rsync) to set up an offsite backup solution. What should be obvious is that creating a simple, flexible server backup system on Linux is easy. With the help of a little ingenuity, you can create your own automated backup service.

It is therefor recommended to verify the file integrity of backups regularly to make sure that they can still be used to recover data if the need should arise. Nothing’s worse than to realize that the backups are unusable.

File Check MD5 is a small portable software for Windows that has been designed for that specific purpose. It can be used to compute MD5 hashes of all files in a specific root folder including subfolders. All computed MD5 hashes will be stored in a text file in that root folder.

The Check Files option can then be used to check files on the backup storage with the MD5 hashes of the original files to ensure data integrity.

One interesting option of the software program is to test the md5 hashes that have been previously computed if the text file is located in the same folder as the executable. It would then only be a matter of adding the File Check MD5 software and the text file with the MD5 hashes to the root of the backup to be able to automatically verify the file integrity.

The only thing that is missing is the ability to select a different storage location for the MD5 hashes. This would make it possible to run the software on read only devices as well.

Additional options are available to save the complete My Documents folder in one backup plan and to save Web Settings which will essentially save Firefox and Internet Explorer cookies and user data. Those predefined backup plans are great for inexperienced users who don’t feel like configuring a backup software.

Custom backup plans can be added which offer two additional options. The first is to create a backup plan for specific folders, partitions or drives of the computer while the second creates a backup plan for specific file extensions. The latter will backup all file extensions of the type on all connected drives. Configuring those custom backup plans is a breeze compared to other backup solutions on the market. Everything can be configured with just a few clicks.

AutoSave Essentials provides a good variety of backup locations. The choice ranges from local hard drives, removable storage devices like USB devices and network / ftp storage. The backup software will automatically recognize if a selected device is not present during scheduled backups and will start the backup as soon as the device comes online again.

Backups can be scheduled to run once a day, week, month, during system start, continuously or manually only. Continuously will monitor the selected files and folders all the time and start the backup whenever file operations take place. Each of the operations will take place in the background with virtually no interference with important system processes or other work that takes place at the same time.

The biggest selling point of AutoSave Essentials is the ease of use. Users who store their important data in the My Documents folder can virtually use the application without interaction of the backup destination drive is the correct one. It works out of the box for those users. Others will have to add backup plans manually but this operating requires minimal user interaction as well.

Avanquest was nice enough to provide me with ten full versions of AutoSave Essentials as an early birthday present to celebrate the third birthday of Ghacks on October 3. If you want to win a full copy of AutoSave Essentials let me know in the comments. Regular users will be at an advantage. So, let me know what you would back up with the software. AutoSave Essentials will run on 32-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The backups can be scheduled and run automatically in the background. Prior to using the software you need to create an account at the Zoogmo website. Those information are used to encrypt the data that is backed up on your computer which means that if you loose those information the backed up data will be lost.

Zoogmo currently has some limitations. The maximum file size is only 50 Megabytes which might be not enough for users who would like to backup larger files. Since this is currently a beta it is most likely that the limit will be raised in the future.

While Zoogmo is great for creating external secure backups I would suggest to use a combination of True Crypt and an external hard drive if you want to backup your files locally. The advantage of course is that you do not need to connect to the Zoogma server at all before you can access your backups.

Take a look at this video that explains the concept of Zoogmo.

Read More:

Zoogmo

A software that is able to protect your important files against corruption is called ICE ECC which creates so called recovery files that can be used to recover files that are corrupted or partially damaged. They can’t recover files that are not there anymore of course but most of the time you have partial files that can be recovered. This is a like the Par2 file system which I have written about earlier in this week.

ICE ECC offers some advantages over Par2 files. First it is possible to create recovery files for directories with no limitation on file size, amount of files and names. The recovery files themselves are compressed to make it easier to store them on your system. Last but not least some tests that have been published on the developers website claim that ICE ECC is a lot faster than Quickpar for instance. I do not think that this is such an important factor after all unless you create recovery files every day.

One way to check the backups for media integrity is to use a freeware called media checker. Media checker works with all media on devices that are currently connected to the computer it is running. It can scan folders or complete drives and really supports everything that you want to check for media integrity.

I contacted the author of Media Checker because it was not clear to me how media checker performed the check and decided whether a file was corrupted or not. The author answered me this way: “Media Checker considers the data to be safe when all the files in all subfolders of a selected media or folder can be read without any error from the beginning to the end. The program list all the files and attempt to read all of them byte by byte until the end.”

A way of using media checker would be to test the backups from time to time and react immediately when one check fails. This works best if you have two or even more backups of the same data of course.