Hacker News Reader

Comment by paule89 | Hacker News Reader

What i really miss on Linux, or for backups in general:

Make it super easy.

I just want to open the software and tell hey here is my network drive/external drive. Please start the backup of all my installed apps, all my configurations, all my music and develop files.

Also for restoring, just make it easy. Can somebody point me to a good solution? The problem is Linux is too diverse. Either you use basic tools like rsync which everybody can use, or you get super specific with automated btrfs backups onto a specific btrfs drive with deduplication and backup snapshots. Sounds super useful. But not easy as well. Also a gui would be nice, or at least a super in depth tutorial walking you through backing up your apps, your configs, your ssh keys. whatevs.

View on HN

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.

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.

Check out fsarchiver, you can do hot backups and it has built in compression. http://www.fsarchiver.org/live-backup/

Someone above mentioned Veeam, which I love for windows, but haven't really tested on Linux. It's free, but not open source.

I personally use rsync to btrfs, but it's not encrypted.

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

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.

> 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.

Well, patio11 said several years ago that tarsnap should charge a lot more. But even at its current prices, the service is way too expensive for personal backups that run into hundreds of GBs. Personal data may not be significantly amenable to deduplication. So almost all the data will be counted for billing. It may be a good solution for tiny backups that run into a few MBs and/or have a lot of duplicated data across the filesystem that's being backed up.

> But really if you want to make it dead simple you can't go wrong with tarsnap

I'd call this everything but dead simple. Maybe for the average software engineer it's okay but I don't I could tell anyone in my family to set this up themselves and then monitor that it's doing it's thing correctly.

TimeMachine is two clicks in self explaining steps (Plug in empty external drive, OS asks if you want to use it as a backup source, you click "yes" and it starts doing backups every hour). That's probably what GP meant with "Make it super easy." not this: https://www.tarsnap.com/gettingstarted.html

It's a cool service but it's not "dead simple".

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com