Simple Backup works to make the backup process simple. In this article I am going to show you how to install and use this handy Linux backup tool.

Installation

As you have grown to expect, sbackup is easy to install as it is included in the standard repositories. To install sbackup follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “sbackup” (no quotes).
3. Mark Simple Backup for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it! You will now find two new entries in your System > Administration menu: Simple Backup Config and Simple Backup Restore. As you can probably guess, the former is used to set up and run your backups whereas the latter is used to restore your backups. Now, let’s see how simple it is to set up a scheduled backup.

Scheduling a backup

Figure 1

Click on System > Administration > Simple Backup Config which will open up the main sbackup config window (see Figure 1). In order to set up a fairly straight-forward backup make sure you hit these sections:

General: You can use this to do standard, automatic, or manual backups. Note: Standard backups will backup all user files, /etc, /usr/local, and /var. That’s a pretty good basic backup scheme.

Include: The particular directories you want to include in your backup.

Exclude: Any particular directories you want to exclude from your backup.

Destination: Where the backup will be stored. By default the backup is in /var/backup. You will probably want to go with an external drive for this. NOTE: You might want to check the box for “Abort backup if destination directory doe not exist”. This will keep the backup from running if you have forgotten to plug in your external drive.

Time: Here you can precisely schedule your backup.  What this actually does is create a cron job for your backup.

Purging: This is a very critical section as it will ensure your backup directory doesn’t get full. Here you can choose either Simple or Logarithmic purging. Simple allows you to just declare how old a backup can be before it is removed. Logarithmic uses an algorithm for keeping various backups. The Logarithmic backup is the recommended choice.

Once you have made all of your choices, click Save and then, if you want, you can run your backup immediately by pressing Backup Now! When you press Backup Now! the process will begin and remain in the background. If you have configured sbackup for a time, the first backup will run at the time you configured.

Restoring a backup

Because the restore is a part of Simple Backup, it will know where you have placed your backups. Until you have actually had a successful backup, there will be nothing to restore (so Simple Backup Restore will find nothing to restore). Once you do have a successful backup all you have to do is follow these steps:

1. Click System > Administration > Simple Backup Restore
2. From the Restore GUI, select which backup you want to restore.
3. Click Restore.

That’s it. Now the process of restoring your files will be begin!

Final thoughts

Between LuckyBackup and Simple Backup you will be hard pressed to find an easier, more reliable backup solution for the Linux desktop. But regardless of what backup solution you use, make sure you DO use a backup or else you stand to lose all of your precious data.

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.

Backerupper not only does a good job of simple backups, it also adds an icon to the GNOME notification area for quick access. And with Backerupper offers enough features to satisfy the users who demand ease of use, as well as those who want a feature-rich tool.

Features

Speaking of features, Backerupper has them:

• Simple configuration.
• Simple installation.
• Profiles.
• Restore.
• Automated backups.
• Limit amount of backup copies stored.
• Quick access from notification area.
• Portable (run Backerupper from your thumb drive).

Now let’s get into the thick of things and install Backerupper.

Installation

Installing Backerupper is simple. You will not find this tool in your repositories so you’re going to have to download it from the

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/backerupper/backerupper/Backerupper-0.24/backerupper-0.24-32.tar.gz

The above command will download the latest (as of this writing) version of Backerupper. Now you need to unpack the tar file with the command (issued from within the directory you downloaded the file):

tar xvzf backerupper-0.24-32.tar.gz

This will create a new directory called backerupper-0.24-32. Change into that directory with the command cd backerupper-0.24-32 and you will find five files and one directory. If you want to install Backerupper issue the following command:

sudo ./install.sh

If you are not on a sudo-based distribution you will want to su to the root user and then issue the command ./install.sh. The install.sh file will copy the file backer to /usr/bin and will create the directory /usr/share/backerupper and then copy the doc directory to the newly created directory.

Once installed all you have to do is issue the command backer as a standard user.

Now if you want to have a portable Backerupper you can  just copy the backer file to your mounted thumb drive. When you run the backer command from your thumb drive you will get a warning that the online help system can not be found and the help system has been disabled. You will see this every time you run the command.

Usage

Figure 1

Now let’s see how Backerupper is used. When you issue the command backer the main window will appear (see Figure 1). As you can see there are no profiles created by default. In order to create a profile you need to click the New button. When you click this button a window will appear (see Figure 2) asking for the details of this profile. The details should be fairly obvious. You can create a profile for every backup you want to create. This window is also where you set up the

Figure 2

automation of the backup. You can also configure a destination directory as the default backup destination.

By default Backerupper will set your backup to happen every day. You might want to change this depending upon the frequency you require for your backup.

After you have created your profile that profile will appear in the Profiles drop down on the main page (see Figure 3).

Even though you have a backup setup for a specific time, you can automatically run that backup by selecting the profile you want to use from the drop down and then clicking the Backup Now button.

It should be pretty obvious that, in order for a backup to occur, Backerupper must be running. If you are one that logs out of your desktop, or shuts off your laptop, you have to remember to start up Backerupper. I would suggest adding Backerupper to your list of startup applications. To do this go to the Preferences sub-menu of the System menu and select Startup Applications. From this new window, click the Add button and fill out the necessary information. Once you have that done, Backerupper will start upon login and your backups will happen.

Restore

Figure 3

The restore process is very simple. Click on the Restore tab in the Backerupper main window (see Figure 3) and follow these steps:

1. Select the profile you want to restore.
2. If you have more than one archive of this directory click the Select Archive button and select which archive you want to restore.
3. Click the Restore button.

That’s it.

Final thoughts

Backerupper is one of the easiest (and fastest) desktop backup solutions I have found. And its portability makes it an even better solution for flexible Linux desktop backup.

Flyback is based on rsync and creates successive backup directories mirroring the files you set up to back up. In order to save space, Flyback hardlinks any unchanged files to previous backups. With Flyback you can backup to either a networked drive (so long as it is mapped), a usb drive, a thumb drive, or a directory within the file system. One thing you want to certainly avoid is backing up to a directory that is also being backed up. In other words, if you are backing up /home/jlwallen you would not want to back up to /home/jlwallen/BACKUP. Instead you would want to back up to something like /BACKUP. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s first learn to install and use Flyback.

Installation

Installing Flyback is fairly simple. You will not find Flyback in any of your repositories, nor can you add repositories so that Fly can be installed with apt-get or any GUI tool. You can, however, install all of the dependencies with apt-get. To do this open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install python python-glade2 python-gnome2 python-sqlite python-gconf rsync

You might find that apt-get will return that everything is already up to date. If so, you’re ready to go. If not, let the installation process happen and then you’ll be ready to go.

After you have issued the above command you can then download the Flyback file with the command:

wget http://flyback.googlecode.com/files/flyback_0.4.0.tar.gz

Now unpack the tar file (from within the directory the file was downloaded) with the command:

tar xvzf flyback_0.4.0.tar gz

which will create a new directory flyback. The next step is to change into the newly created directory and start up the application.

Starting and using Flyback

In order to start the application you will issue the command (from within the flyback directory):

python flyback.py

Figure 1

When the main window opens (see Figure 1) it might seem like a number of directories and/or files are already marked for backup. This is not the case. You have to actually add the files/directories from with the Preferences window. So the first thing you will want to do is click on the Edit menu and select Preferences. From within the Preferences window (see Figur 2) you will need to take care of a few tasks. The first task (and you might get a warning about this) is to configure the backup location. This is fairly

Figure 2

straightforward – just click on the Storage Location tab and then click the drop down to select  your backup location. After you have configured this click on the Include/Exclude Directories tab. From within that tab you select the directories you want to include in your backup from the drop down and then click the Add button. In order to delete  a directory from the backup you simply right click the directory from the “Included dirs” pane and select Delete.

Once you have all of your directories set up, you can then create exclude patterns. Fortunately the application includes a great Help file on creating exclude patterns. To get to this file click on the Help button just above the OK button. This will give you all the information you need on creating excluding patterns.

Figure 3

After you have your directories set up, you can either click OK and then click the Backup button on the main window, or you can set up a scheduled backup from within the Backup Schedule tab (see Figure 3).

In order to set this up as an automatic backup click the “automatically” check box and then set up the time you want to run the backup.

From this same window you can configure Flyback to delete backups when space is need or when a backup is older than a defined time period.

One thing to note. If you are setting up a regular, automatic backup, you need to make sure the location you are backing up to will be available. For instance, if you backup to a thumb drive, that thumb drive best be inserted when the backup is set to run.

Final thoughts

That’s it. A very simple backup solution that is somewhat flexible, but very user-friendly. Although not the most advanced solution, but a solution that should meet most of your desktop backup needs.