backup software

I like backintime. Has a GUI and CLI and easy to use and just works. It use this for backup and restoring individual files. For a disk image backup I use clonezilla.

What error message do you get? Are you restoring the whole backup (I successfully did that the last time I changed my laptop) or just part of it from Nautilus contextual menu ("Restore Missing Files..." or "Revert to Previous Version...")?

Hi guys

The default backup program worked this past weekend! I don't know why I had trouble with it before. I will do a few incremental backups and try again in a few weeks.

I'm optimistic and hopeful that it will continue to work for me; thanks again for the replies

M

I currently have a backup script that runs once a month in the first
Friday from my user's crontab.

The script is short, and uses:

* Rsync (latest versions downloaded from Guix).
* GNU Tar.
* Whiptail (for dialog boxes).
* mktemp (from GNU Coreutils).
* basename (from GNU Coreutils).

The crontab entries use:
* GNU Screen (so that I can answer to the dialog box after the job started, because cron starts it in the backgroud).
* date (from GNU Coreutils).

# Begin of script
#!/bin/sh
# # Copyright (C) 2016 Adonay "adfeno" Felipe Nogueira <name at domain>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, version 3 of the License.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program. If not, see .

temporary_directory="$(mktemp --tmpdir -d "rsync-backup.XXX")"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
whiptail --yesno \
"Start backup with rsync?

Target directory:

$temporary_directory" 0 0
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
cd "$1"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
"$HOME/.guix-profile/bin/rsync" -v \
-aERS --no-D \
--delete-excluded \
--include-from="$2" \
"./" "$temporary_directory"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
cd "$(dirname "$temporary_directory")"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Packing temporary directory: $temporary_directory"
tar -cpz -f "$3" "$(basename "$temporary_directory")"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
rm -fR "$temporary_directory"
else
echo "Packing failed! Keeping temporary directory."
fi;fi;fi;fi;fi;fi
# End of script

The crontab entries follow the following model:

# Begin of crontab entry
00 13 * * 5 [ $(date '+\%d') -le 7 ] && screen -dm -S "rsync-backup-Projects" sh "$HOME/Software/backup.sh" "$HOME/Projects" "$HOME/.config/Backup/Projects.txt" "$HOME/Projects.tar.gz"
# End of crontab entry

For at least one of them that runs in the same time as the others, I use
this instead:

# Begin of crontab entry
00 13 * * 5 [ $(date '+\%d') -le 7 ] && screen -dm -S "rsync-backup-home" sh -c '"$HOME/.guix-profile/bin/mpv" "$HOME/Music/Wildfire Games - 0 A.D. Original Soundtrack/Omri Lahav - Eastern Dreams (CC BY-SA 3.0).opus"; sh "$HOME/Software/backup.sh" "$HOME" "$HOME/.config/Backup/home.txt" "$HOME/$(basename "$HOME").tar.gz"'
# End of crontab entry

... This uses mpv (downloaded from Guix) to play a music that can also
be heard by the same user (even though mpv was started by crontab
entry).

When the backup starts, since it tells me where the backups will be
done, I can put a previously-made backup there making sure GNU Tar
preserves permissions, ownership, and strips the first component (this
last part is needed if you want to "re-enable" the tarbomb that my
script tries to disable). All of which is documented in GNU Tar
manual. This allows me to do incremental backups and also keep the
.tar.gz compression and archiving, at the expense of having to extract the previous .tar.gz archive myself.