Seeking for a backup tool
To be short, I am searching for an application with a user interface, that supports updating/refreshing readily available partition image clones, so that I does not need to create a full drive backup every-time I make a backup. I already used Clonezilla to backup two internal notebook hard drives with success, but AFAIK it does not support this feature. Any suggetions?
What would be the source to update / refresh partion backups ?
I do not exactly know a GUI tool but in the end this could boil down to mounting a dd image file via loop back option (similar to an ISO), apply the changes from the source to the dump via rsync and then unmount the dd image.
I am not aware of any backup solution which allows to do incremental backups to a full dump.
Depending on your knowledge I would go for Python and some toolkit (e.g. GTK) or may be Gambas / Lazarus plus some shell commands. Gambas if you are more the Basic kind of guy or Lazarus if you worked with Delpi / Opbject pascal so far.
It is really easiy to hack together a simplistic GUI in the form editors today.
The source would be the first "full" backup. What I basically want is to eliminate the need for making complete data backups, when I do make a backup, say, once in a month. Since the majority of data will stay the same, it makes no sense to wait hours, just to have a difference of few megabytes (mainly documents, and scripts) saved.
It does not need to have a GUI, an aptitude like UI is sufficient, but I really don't want to play with Terminal commands, since I have very bad experience with this.
Since I am busy working on other projects (mainly with moving to cloud), and because I require a tool that I can rely and depend upon, working on a new GUI for some command-line tools is not an option for me.
You are still quite unprecise what the source for the backup is...
Your mounted home dir ? Do you copy your full home partition as dd image and want to add modified files ? All this is important since a full partition backup is a completely different beast than a incremental filesystem backup.
There is a backup functionality integrated into vanilla Ubuntu. Unfortunately I do not remember the name and have no clue if it is available under Trisquel.
I'll try to explain this as simple as possible. I have a laptop, with Trisquel installed, including my data files, like documents, multimedia files, various downloads, etc.. The data is stored on the internal hard disk, which is assembled within the laptop. Now, I have an external 1TB HDD, that I can connect through USB 3.0 (ExpressCard) port. I also have a Parted Magic bootable CD with Clonezilla pre-installed.
I want to make a "full backup" of the internal HDD, including every partition, MBR, etc. to the external drive, so I can later restore the "clone" of the disk in case of a HDD failure, and continue to use the laptop, like nothing have happened. The problem is, that I want to do this regularly, to ensure that my new data files will not be lost if something happen. Making a full 128-256GB images every month, also for multiple computers is not an efficient way of doing this.
I didn't read the part about the "full backup" before I posted about Deja Dup. I haven't done that with Deja Dup before.
Deja Dup is a general data backup tool. It does not do partition cloning, so it doesn't fit the task. Other than than, it's a nice app, mainly useful for recovering accidentally modified/deleted/lost files, using timed backups on the background of the most important stuff.
Hm, I would choose a different strategy. Put your home dir on a dedicated partition. Then backup the system partition(s) like / with a full backup. For your changeable stuff you could do filebased incremental backup like with rdiff-backup or rsnapshot.
To my best knowledge only the bootloader is the one thing you need to make a binary backup. The rest of your directory tree could be backed up at file base.
What do you mean by putting the /home/user folder into a dedicated partition? It's already on a separate XFS file-system, and that cannot be changed (XFS partitions cannot be shrunk), unless I recreate the partition from backup.
Since backup is not something I'd like to pay too much attention, I want to keep it as simple as possible, in other words, connecting the external drive into the USB port, starting the backup software, selecting to do a backup, and the application should do the rest for me automatically, hassle-free.
I want to do this once in a while, and I would not like to backup my local data from home folder separately, although this will possibly work also by using Deja-Dup, and this seems to be the closest way to do what I want. It's a shame Clonezilla doesn't contain such an important functionality.
I can find this list, which includes several free programs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_cloning_software
(I've looked at how the RAID technology could help with that, but it doesn't seem to be a good alternative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Data_backup)
I remember (/have the impression of) reading about a tool that did specifically what you mention - of only updating, instead of copying the whole content again to, a hard drive backup. And, this was for Ubuntu. So, I suppose it's a free software, also. The thing is that, I can't remember its name... But, I think the name itself reflected that functionality... I'm sorry, if that isn't much of a help. But, I'm almost sure that such a program exists.
Found it.
It's the "rsync" program - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/rsync - included in this list: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem#Backup_Utilities
The first three programs on that list have graphical interfaces. (Which I assume it's what you mean by "user interfaces".) And, the mentioned "rsync" program also has a GUI frontend: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/rsync#Grsync
user interface - anything other than working with command line utilities
RAID(0) is a completely different thing. It works by using two same 3.5" desktop sized drives in a way, that the same data is written on both of them at the same time, assuming that if one fails, you still have a copy of your data on the second one. This technology has several drawbacks I don't want to get into.
I'd agree with Darksouls approach. This method would also mean quicker and less corrupted backups, with smaller file sizes.
You mean by using dd+rsync, right? This will eventually be the first thing I'm gonna try, since it seems to be the simplest, and most convenient way.
On 27/09/13 23:56, mYself wrote:
> To be short, I am searching for an application with a user interface,
> that supports updating/refreshing readily available partition image
> clones, so that I does not need to create a full drive backup
> every-time I make a backup. I already used Clonezilla to backup two
> internal notebook hard drives with success, but AFAIK it does not
> support this feature. Any suggetions?
I've used and recommend Unison. It has a CLI and a GUI (Unison-gtk), it
uses rsync in the background, and it's easy to use. You can also
painlessly use SSH for synchronising files over the network.
Andrew.
Does this support "disk cloning" and "image compression"? Both of them are important aspects for me.
rsync has many options. There are gui frontends, as mentioned earlier, but a simple script is very useful for me. Maybe it could work for you. Some examples:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Full_System_Backup_with_rsync
- http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=28150
Guys, thank you all for your kindness to help me with my problem. Unfortunalely, I was very busy lately, and was not able to quickly respond to all of your reactions.
The bad thing is that I was not found what I was hoping for, but at least there are some alternatives that, if they will work, I would be happy with them too.
The next time I make a backup, I will try some GUI frontend for dd+rsync, testing the ones from your suggestions first, and I will also look up for some others on the Internet.
At least I know what path should I take.