Natural predator of every computer user (win, mac, linux & the others) is… disk fail.
To preserve ours species we use backup systems. We have many of them. Some are robust, other clever and other sparkling… in most cases you need to install software and you have to configure which folder contains “important” stuff… and a few backup rules.
Here’s my personal trip into backup techs.
First I checked out TimeVault… sounded good… way to similiar to Apple’s TimeMachine but I checked it out eventually. It seems a good start but it’s quite… stuck. Latest package on launchpad is 0.7.5-1 and is described as “beta candidate”… a quick look at repository shows that last code update is from 2010 and on ubuntu is flagged as “unmaintained”.. probably a dead project.
Then I found FlyBack… sounded good too! On the official project home page it’s said that “there is no formal releases just whatever is in subversion”… could work for me: so I took a look at repo. This sources too are frozen to 2010. Gosh… another dead project? Actually it seems to be just frozen but in a stable version… so it should work fine. It seems to be developed usign python… I like that. I found this article (in italian) with a quick practical introduction to FlyBack usage.
Then I continued searching and I found someone using GIT as a backup system. Problem is that with binary data GIT it’s not the best.
Finally I came up with an hint about rsync and other similar cool programs ready to use in linux distro. After a few more time spent searching I found rSnapshot. As explained here the steps you have to take are:
- install it (if you’re on ubuntu “sudo apt-get install rsnapshot” otherwise read here)
- configure it
- crontab it
…done!
Restore files is simple as copying them from repository to original destination.