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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

I honestly can't understand why distro makers like Cannonical don't have some out-of-the-box solution that works like Timemachine. Every step one has to configure himself can lead to a mistake and thus to a potential data loss. IMO an OS without a very-simple-to-set-up backup system that supports at the very least remote storage, incremental backup and restore during reinstallation, is incomplete.

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Well, there is something; assuming that you refer to an Ubuntu Desktop backup engine with a simple interface, there is Deja Dup.

The problem is though, that the last time I've checked, it was excessively simple- it didn't support individual files selection.

It shouldn't be desktop-only. It could be a well tested script with a good CLI that also has a simple GUI. Something like a backup shouldn't have many options anyway. Apple has the right ideas there IMO: target volume selection and defining backup exceptions are pretty much all you need. I'd prefer if the target were simpler than a sparsebundle though, which should totally be doable with an rdiff or rsync backed script solution.

Deja Dup is a GUI for duplicity.

I've been using duplicity for a few years now and have been quite satisfied. It did seem slow when I first started using it. I learned to live with it; you run backups overnight anyways.

From what I can remember, a lot of the slowness came from GPG, and specifically files being compressed before encryption. Disabling compression speeds things up, but trades off disk space (and security).

I wonder what it'd take to reengineer the thing to take advantage of multicore -- being CPU-bound on a single core is I think what makes it slow.

After having a look at duplicity [1], it actually reads as pretty decent. I still wonder why research is needed for such a thing, instead of Cannonical taking it, installing a good default script, adding some GUI in their installation image (choosing your sftp backup target, username, password (managed by keyring)), so everyone would already be on the right path.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DuplicityBackupHowto

Something like zfsnap? (https://github.com/zfsnap/zfsnap) No special GUI but you can just browse to /.zfs/snapshot/<timestamp> and manipulate the files like normal files.

I'm a bit confused by this. So is ZFS a requirement or not? Do I have to reformat an existing Linux to ZFS in order to use it? Or is that only for the target volume? Even OSX, which it claims to support? I've never seen anyone using ZFS in production there to be honest.

Yes ZFS is a requirement, and it is designed to run on any OS that runs ZFS. You don't need the full machine to be running ZFS, just whatever volume you want to snapshot.

It is a bit unclear if you haven't been looking at other snapshot management utilities. Many other tools have various dependencies which may or may not work on your chosen operating system.

So generally the requirements are:

  - ZFS running on the volume you want to snapshot
  - Bourne shell
  - Gregorian calendar

As far as OS X goes, I'm not sure how many people run ZFS in production but I know there were some people working on it. I've never used it but it still seems to be updated: https://github.com/openzfsonosx/zfs

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