But that simplicity doesn’t mean Deja Dup is complete bereft of features. Not at all. In fact, you’d be surprised at how many different ways you can backup with Deja Dup. In this article you are going to see how easy it is to back up your Fedora 13 files and folders with this handy tool.

Features

Deja Dup offers the following features:

• Amazon S3 cloud support.
• Support for local or remote backups.
• Encrypts and compresses your data.
• Incremental back up.
• Restore from any particular backup.
• Scheduled backups.
• Integrated into the GNOME desktop.

But how does it work? Is it really that simple? Yes. Let’s find out.

Usage

Figure 1

To start Deja Dup click Applications > System Tools > Deja Dup Backup Tool. When Deja Dup starts up you will see it’s main (and only) window (see Figure 1). As I mentioned earlier, this window consists of two simple buttons (Restore and Backup). It can’t get more obvious than this. If you want to backup you hit the Backup button…you get the idea.

On first run, hen you click the Backup button, a Wizard will pop open to help you set up your backup preferences. This window wants the following information:

Backup location: This is where you backup to. If you want to connect to a remote system you just click the Connect

Figure 2

To Server button which will open up a new window (see Figure 2). This new window should look very familiar to anyone that has connected a GNOME desktop to a Windows share. From the Service type drop down select the type of connection you want to make and then fill in the information. If you are wanting to backup to a Windows share, Deja Dup will mount the share on your system. Once the share is mounted you have to select the mount in the Backup location drop down in the Preferences Wizard.

Include/Exclude files: In this preferences section you decide what is to be included in your backups. By default Deja Dup will include your Home (~/) directory and exclude your Trash folder. If you decide to go with the default, just make sure your backup location has plenty of room.

Those are the only two major steps in the Wizard. Once you have added the Include/Exclude files to the Preferences you will be at the last step of the Wizard where you can click the Backup button to run the first backup. If, however, you have opted to encrypt your backup you will be given one final step – to add an encryption password. Once you click Continue the backup will begin. Once the first backup is complete Deja Dup will ask if you want to automatically backup. You can select from Daily,  Weekly (default), Monthly, or bi-Monthly.  You do not get to choose the time for your backup.

NOTE: If you are doing regularly scheduled backups to a Windows share, make sure that share is mounted when the backup is to occur or else the backup will fail.

Final thoughts

That’s it. Deja Dup is about as user-friendly a backup tool as you will find. It’s simple to use and very reliable. If you are trying to find a good backup tool that will not wrack your brain with complexity, yet still offers enough features to get the job done give Deja Dup a try.

There is one thing that most Linux backup tools have in common and that is their underlying technologies. In most cases one of the tools that make the GUI backup tools possible is the venerable rsync. Rsync is an incredibly fast and lightweight file copy tool that can not only copy files to and from a local machine, it can also copy over a network connection – which makes rsync an ideal candidate for user-generated backup scripts or cron jobs.

In this tutorial you will learn how easy it is to use rysnc to not only back up specified directories to an external usb drive, but also to backup over a network connection via ssh.

Command structure

The structure of the rsync command is:

rsync [OPTIONS] SOURCE DESTINATION

Where SOURCE is the location of the directory to be backed up and DESTINATION is where the backup will be placed.

Now the structure of the command changes when you are employing a network facility such as ssh. At that point the command structure would look like:

rsync [OPTIONS] ssh SOURCE user@destination:/directory

Where user is the user name on the remote machine, destination would be either an IP address or domain, and /directory is the explicit path to the directory you want to back up to.

Usage

For the first example we are going to backup the directory /home/jlwallen/Documents to the directory /media/disk/BACKUPS. This destination is a directory located on an external USB drive obviously mounted to /media/disk. The command for this backup will be:

rsync -avh /home/jlwallen/Documents /media/disk/BACKUPS

This is where we run into our first “gotcha”. What happens with the above command is that any subdirectory in /home/jlwallen/Documents will be created on /media/disk/BACKUPS. So if you want to create a similar directory structure on the destination you should first create a parent directory similar to that of the source. So before you run the rsync command issue this command:

mkdir /media/disk/BACKUPS/Documents

The new rsync command would be:

rsync -avh /home/jlwallen/Documents /media/disk/BACKUPS/Documents

The options used in the above command are:

• a: Archive mode
• v: Verbose mode
• h: Output in human readable format.

Now let’s backup the same source to a remote location with the help of secure shell. It will help your cause to first make sure you can log into the remove machine via ssh. Once you have that working you are ready to backup. Using our same example we are going to backup to user jlwallen at the IP address 192.168.1.10 to the directory /home/jlwallen/BACKUPS/Documents. To do this the command would look like:

rsync -avhe ssh /home/jlwallen/Documents jlwallen@192.168.1.10:/home/jlwallen/BACKUPS/Documents

The added option is e which allows you to specify the remote shell to use.

You will be prompted for the remote users’ password and then the coping will begin. But what if you don’t want to have to use a password? If you are wanting to set up automated, remote backups you will have to allow this process to happen without entering a password. To do this you have to create an SSH key without a password. Here are the steps for this:

create an ssh key on the source machine with the command:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

Press enter when prompted for a password.

Once the key is created copy that key to the destination key with the following command:

ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/id_dsa.pub username@destination

Where username is the user on the remote machine and destination is the IP or domain of the remote machine.

Now rsync copying can be done without having to enter a password.

Final thoughts

The nice thing about this setup is you can now use rsync to create a cron job for backup automation. Rsync is an incredibly flexible and reliable means for backing up your directories and files. It should be since it is the foundation that so many other backup tools were based on.