Cronopete – A Linux clone of Time Machine

In the past, duplicity would not save dot files or dot directories, e.g. .config/, .emacs, .local/, so many settings would be lost or not saved. No idea if they addressed it meanwhile, but back then it was a show stopper for me. Lost some of my steam savegames :-p

Duplicity works by making a full backup and then series of incremental backups based on it. Eventually you can make another full backup and new series, but you cannot delete full or incremental backup without rendering whole series corrupt. In Time Machine (and - I presume - this software), if you delete a backup checkpoint for a specific date you lose only file changes captured by that checkpoint, but state of the backup at the checkpoints before and after remain intact.

One of my guiding principles in UX is pretty much this. Be explicit about describing the thing that you are talking about. Then make it even more explicit.

What I would like is something similar but for my local zfs/btrfs disks. Copy snapshots to an external drive, but the issue I have more often than not would be deleted/overwrittem files rather than damaged disks which regular snapshots would resolve. I don't always have access to my NAS.

The thing is the only real backup solution which worked for me was clonezilla. Offline backup of a complete drive. But it is too much work. Its offline, it takes time etc. But at least i have a known working state which i can restore onto and have everything. I would need a live clonezilla backup onto a network drive and a bootloader, which has functionality to restore that backup.

Veeam Agent for Linux Free Edition (https://www.veeam.com/linux-backup-free.html?ad=in-text-link...) is not open source and only has a text gui, but it's relatively easy to setup.

I lazily set up Duplicity one day (the tool that comes with Ubuntu) and it's been working ever since. Has support for retrieving backups, allows you to recover individual files from the file explorer (at least on Ubuntu, that is) and has a one-click full backup restore.

It comes with a GUI in which you tell it what to backup what to ignore, where to backup to and when to run the backup schedule. It'll also ask for a backup password to secure the backup and will ask you to enter it once in a while to make sure you don't forget it. It also makes full backups instead of partial ones to ensure that delta backups don't become corrupt.

It's mostly a python wrapper around rsync but it does all the annoying stuff for you.

I've used restic (https://github.com/restic/restic) in the past, and it works quite well.

Other people would also recommend borg (https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) although I've never used it so I can't say anything about it. rsync.net even has a special offer if you're using them (https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html)

But really if you want to make it dead simple you can't go wrong with tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/). It's written and maintained by one of the biggest names in the crypto community, the guy who has spawned scrypt, among other things.

I really like duplicati. It works in Linux, Windows and MacOS. It has good support for tons of back ends for storage (nfs, cifs, dropbox, s3, ssh, etc). The software is FOSS and it has a design that is well suited to cloud storage: it makes blocks of changes that are encrypted. As long as you have the password, it can use just those blocks to decrypt and restore.

It does automated restore tests. Setup is pretty easy. You install it, navigate to the internal web page and follow the wizard. It has sane defaults but you can change it to skip stuff you don't want backed up.

Duplicity is OK but it tends to be pretty CPU heavy when it runs and you can't control when it runs with much granularity. I used to use and like CrashPlan but its current pricing model doesn't work well for my home environment.Granted, my backups weren't huge so the memory usage of CrashPlan was OK for me.

I use (and highly recommend) Timeshift [1].

The GUI is nice and intuitive, and it supports both simple rsync snapshots and more complicated btrfs drives. It took me about five minutes to set it up to automatically back up once a day / week / month.

My personal setup excludes the home directory and saves backups once a week to a `/timeshift` folder, but you can easily set it up to write to an external drive, include your home folder, or back up manually. Somebody even wrote a script to take a backup before a system update with pacman hooks.

[1] https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

GH page says Py3.

BackInTime is an excellent alternative to TimeMachine! Searching old backups is literally just browsing directories. I've used it for years until Ubuntu started nagging to use the included backup utility.

Once you make the first snapshot, BackInTime is much faster that the recommended backup. Where the native backup shines is encryption and file splitting: you could backup to a cloud drive and not worry about strangers looking at or extracting metadata from your personal files.

I'm using BackInTime in three workstations for almost 3 years. Never let me down once.

I love how it stores the configuration in the backup folder. You just mount your backups, fire up BiT in a new machine, show the foler, and viola!

Addendum: BiT is python3. Debian Testing removed all python2 packages from mandatory installment 3 days ago. I have no python2 runtime on my system, yet BiT runs happily.

Time Machine has one huge issue: when it doesn't work, it becomes a bigger problem.

I strongly agree, while I'd rather run Linux, this is the reason I can't get off mac. I have restored backups at least 5 or 6 times over the years, including last week. Once, I had to jack around with wiping a fresh Catalina before the restore worked, because of APFS/HFS issues, which the restoration UI complained about. But it has always worked when I need it. Post-restore, I'm exactly back where I was. With hundreds of gigabytes of geospatial data, and a decade of software projects, I can't start from scratch without losing weeks of time.

I believe the Time Machine is a white elephant, a relic.

It ought to be able to do these things as good as (if not better) apps like restic, borg, backblaze etc : dedup, compression, unlimited versioning (at file level), integrity checks, granular search/restore, possibility to set a cloud destination (at least iCloud).

But a lot of these things it doesn't even try to.

IMHO, 3D navigation in Time Machine is more of a UI gimmick than actually necessary.

I think I would prefer a calendar view at the top, with dates/times that have snapshots highlighted, and a file manager view at the bottom. Kind of like Wayback Machine.

The name “Time Machine”, however, is genius.

To me, the distinguishing feature of Time Machine is that it reliably works. It worked reliably when I first bought a Mac 12 years ago, it works reliably today. I'll put up with the fact that it's slow and naive (file and hardlink based), and the UI gimmicks are kind of unimportant to me. I care about the recovery.

For me, the distinguishing feature of Time Machine is how wonderfully primitive it is. You can mount a backup volume and just browse the hardlinks. I've written simple Ruby scripts to dig out some information. I couldn't have done that if it were a binary black box, like everything else is nowadays.

I'd call Time Machine "2.5D", since it's really just layers. There's a million examples of useful user interfaces which use 2.5D layering.

I wouldn't call Microsoft Bob "3D" at all. It didn't even use layering. It was a 2D program where a couple of the wallpapers depicted 3D scenes.

For folks that want to back up data on remote servers, BackupPC is one of very few comprehensive backup systems I've found that can run on a server hidden in a closet somewhere and connect out to the remotes to retrieve data. Most backup systems run on the remotes and have the remotes connect into the backup server in some fashion, which I find kinda horrifying.

I've used BackupPC for a long time and I totally love it, though I get why it's never been the most popular option. The initial setup will take an experienced sysadmin a couple of hours if they're doing it for the first time.

I really liked BackupPC, but found the storage requirements to be pretty staggering for ~100 machines. IIRC (it's been a decade), large files that were appended to (log files, Zope DBs, pretty much any database), would get fully copied and stored for every backup copy saved. I also recall backup performance to be pretty bad, we had a number of systems that couldn't backup daily because they took >24 hours. We were adding new BackupPC servers constantly.

I ended up building a backup system that was a thin layer and used SSH+rsync+ZFS for all the heavy lifting. Eventually added a web-based GUI. Went from 10 backup servers to 1 because of ZFS snapshots.

ZFS snapshots is rsync+hardlinks on steroids.

The software is available at: https://github.com/tummy-dot-com/tummy-backup

borg is nice, easy to configure and also has encryption very well integrated.

Or Vorta, if you want GUI. https://vorta.borgbase.com/

I have been looking for something exactly like borg but never showed up in my google search. Thanks for mentioning borg

Generally, I liked borg, but I did run into a situation a few years ago where borg would fail to recover parts of my backups because of some unicode error. I didn't knowingly have any unicode filenames in my home directory, but something annoyed it to the point that it would bomb out during recovery. I tried for a few hours using different mechanisms to do the recovery, but couldn't find any way to resolve it.

So, as always with backups, make sure you do regular test recoveries.

First thing I thought too. I like and trust it as I doubt Mint would play with danger. They're solid.

Not just for Mint, I've had a very good experience with it on Manjaro. Especially with a pacman hook to backup before a system update [1]...

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/timeshift-autosnap/

> Although neither the webpage nor README explains how it works, I'm guessing it misses a vital Time Machine feature, which is FSLogger.

I don't know what FSLogger is, and you don't describe the functionality, and you say that you guess that this new free software suite doesn't provide it.

Is it something like inotify on GNU/Linux?

I do constant backups of 500GB of data via syncthing from my main machines (desktop, laptop) into my archiver, which then uses borgbackup to run an archive / snapshot periodically. Syncthing takes at most a minute to pick up on changes via inotify.

Is this the kind of OSX-only killer feature that you're hinting at?

If it were running constantly, it could use inotify. Since this only runs periodically, using rsync to do the scanning is probably the best choice.

It delegates all the actual file operations to rsync. In practice, it looks like it does multiple scans each hour - glob on all excluded folders, then running rsync with a big list of excludes for each configured folder.

There no clever modification monitoring. I'd keep this away from folders with many thousands of files.

> The name comes from anacronopete ("who flies through time"), which is a time machine featured in the novel from Enrique Gaspar y Rimbaud, and published in 1887 (eight years before than H.G. Wells'Time Machine).

From the website.

I'm a Spanish speaker and that does not make much sense to me, but it might mean something in the latin american variants, I guess.

Spanish is one of these languages where absolutely every single word in the language is a profanity in some dialect, variant, or region.

I think the killer feature of time machine is that it's dead simple and intuitive for non technical users to do regular full system backups.

You plug in an external HD, open time machine, flip a big switch that goes from "Time Machine is Off" to "Time Machine is On" and the software does the rest.

Full backups, incremental backups, reminders to connect your drive when it hasn't been backed up for a while, and a visual interface for selecting previous versions to restore to.

i've been using restic daily to a local store (with compression and encryption turned on), and then once restic has finished its daily run then i rclone to backblaze. i keep one snapshot per day for a week, 1 weekly snapshot for a month, and 6 monthly snapshots. i pay about £1 per month for about 250GB of data (prior to compression / encryption).

for those unfamiliar to restic, you can mount a r/o snapshot via fuse for ease of access as well as the command line tool to programmatically access the repo.

There's a dbus layer which defines the actual backup operations, so without actually diving into the code to confirm this - I suspect there's a reasonable separation.

As does ZFS, unless I'm missing some distinction of "first class" in ZFS.

I'm really looking forward to Ubuntu 20.04 ZFS support. If I can use crypto with it (either the ZFS crypto or LUKS stuff), I'm going to switch my workstations over to it. ZFS snapshots work so, so well.

One thing I've really wanted from HAMMER is the deduplication. I've always had problems with ZFS dedup. I tend to really want it on my backup servers, but the DDT requires pretty amazing amounts of RAM. HAMMER's dedup seems less RAM-hungry, but I've only run small tests of it.

Or restic.

I've been using rsnapshot on /home for about 8 years. I run it once an hour in a cronjob. After using NetApp file servers with .snapshot dirs it is great to have something that kind of emulates it.

Rsnapshot is great. Super simple and reliable.

I keep seeing new time machine-esque backup tools and feel like they are re-inventing the wheel in a more complicated way.

Some complexity is acceptable sure, say to encrypt backups for remote storage.

But the rsync hardlink approach used by rsnapshot is super rugged and just works for a majority of workloads.